


Listing

by 35grams (caxxe)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Body Worship, Denial, Dressing wounds, During the War, Intimacy, Knifeplay, M/M, Massage, Mutual Pining, PTSD, Reconciliation, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Titan Erwin, after the war, canon compliant up to and not including return to shiganshina, canonverse, no humans beyond walls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-03-21 14:56:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 50,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3696560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caxxe/pseuds/35grams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He chased his sighs with hands that felled beasts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Knock

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. (of a ship) to lean to one side, typically because of a leak or unbalanced cargo.  
> 2\. (archaic) to enlist for military service.  
> 3\. (archaic) to want.
> 
>  

                The commander blinked the pink afterglare from his eyes and began to pen the post-expedition reports. He shelved the meat shortage notice he had started the night before the expedition. There was no shortage anymore.

                He never checked the time the night after they returned to the walls. No night was ever longer.

                Erwin saw him before he heard the knock. The lamplight had dimmed and the stand was crooked so the light curled sloppily across the folds in the captain's crossed arms and threw a glare on a belt buckle and little else.

                "You're listing," he said. The words were low but they shot through the silenced room. They pierced through the ringing in Erwin's ears. He didn't remember when it had started.

                "To the right," he added when Erwin said nothing. His steps echoed on the hardwood floors and the ringing was almost gone. Erwin straightened as he drew nearer. His back protested the move with a rich crack.

                Erwin had noticed. His shots had been off. A degree or two and no more, but at such exorbitant heights and speeds, the smallest miscalculation is fatal.  He flew as if he carried stones. Medics found no bruises or fractures to corroborate the change. He laid down his pen.

                "You shouldn't be up this late, captain."

                The words were low but scraped at his throat even so. He hadn't stopped giving orders since sunrise.

                Erwin thought he saw something change in that impassive face. It might have been the light. Levi rounded the desk and passed behind him. His arms uncrossed and his hand rose and at that, the midnight haze lifted and there was nothing in the world but the breath in his lungs and the curve of that hand. It hovered over his shoulder. A nail caught on a fold in his shirt. Erwin felt the palm's heat radiating through the cloth. He didn't dare turn as Levi passed behind him. He felt a firm grip on the back of his chair. Cool air rushed over his shoulder again.

                "Fix it," Levi said. He let go of the chair and left.

                Erwin wasn't disappointed. Levi doesn't touch. Levi isn't touched. He scolded himself for expecting any different.

                There was another knock the night they returned from the next expedition.

                The footfalls were heavier. Sharper. In the right light, he almost looked angry.

                "You're still listing," he said as he rounded the desk once more. It wasn't accusatory. It didn't have much bite. Erwin felt his eyes on him like an itch, like a burn.

                He braced a hip against the desk and Erwin looked up from the expense reports. The lamplight pierced the dewy drops the towel had missed on his arms. His sleeves were bunched at his elbows. His arms were crossed.

                Erwin hummed in response. It was a noncommittal thing, and the captain wasn't satisfied. Erwin glanced at his exposed arms, at the angry blush of skin scrubbed nearly off the bone. It wasn't wise to think these things so soon after an expedition, he reminded himself a thought too late. He blinked away the lingering images of soldiers and dreamers painting electric green fields.

                He tried again, eager to return to the blessed cerebral void of figures and statistics. "I recalibrated my anchors before we left," he said. "The gear must have-"

                "It's not the gear," Levi muttered as if Erwin was missing something maddeningly obvious.  Then he did it again. He raised his hand and stepped behind him. Erwin waited for the grip on his chair.

                It was a petty thing to want to clap him on the back or squeeze his shoulder or his hand or offer something, anything, when they were more dirt and grime and titan blood than flesh or when a job was well done or when a friend or a teammate was coming back in pieces or not at all or when words were too cheap or too hollow but Levi doesn't touch. Levi isn't touched.

                From what the commander understood of acclimating soldiers from the underground, the beasts were a hideous relief. The titan threat was real and fast and shared. The traumas of that aborted city were invisible. They were slow. They were singular.  

                It had taken months to convince him to walk about with one blade and not three. Months before he stopped habitually locking doors and windows and peering into every corner of every room, and if they weren't on such an unforgiving schedule, Erwin wondered if he'd spend his days peering into every corner of the sky. He wondered if he'd peer into every corner of the sea.

                "Keep working," Erwin heard him say and he could think of a thousand reasons not to and a thousand more questions but he forgot them all when small but heavy hands traced the slope of his shoulders and closed on his neck. A thumb brushed past his rising pulse and kneaded hard, widening  circles into his nape and though they were nowhere near his windpipe, he was winded all the same.

                Levi murmured a correction to one of his figures. Erwin recalculated as his nape burned and his shoulders fell, though he hadn't imagined he'd held them so high, had wound them like a pair of aching springs.

                The hands wound farther and skirted against his collar. With each pass, Erwin hated the fabric a little more. His free hand twitched and he would have parted the first button from his collar had some part of him not emerged from his stupefied haze. He wondered distantly if this was a shade of unprofessional before his face became a shade of something else when a hard dig between the blades of his shoulders rocked from him an airy sigh.  

                The commander meant to draw this novelty to an end in earnest, but it was all he could do to wrap his mouth around his name, to trap his lip on the v as the hands lingered on a knot.

                He was sobered a touch by the fading echoes of footfalls on a neatly lacquered floor as a single blink separated the brush of calloused fingertips at his nape and the snap of a shutting door.

                Erwin would have been content to consign the odd evening to the back of his mind if he hadn't begun to mind his back. The very next morning, he woke before reveille with filled canisters and didn't touch the ground again until they had emptied. His form had never been so exact, his turns never so sharp.

                The evening after the next expedition, he heard a knock.

 


	2. The Commander

 

                He strode in, took half of the expense reports and settled into a chair opposite the commander without a word. Erwin watched his pen skirt over the forms for a moment before returning to his own.

                 Sometime in the evening, Levi pushed the forms aside and rubbed his hands. Erwin's pen stilled for a moment. He calculated a profit margin as the light caught on a spidery white scar on the captain's right hand. He revised the equine budget and followed the curves in his penmanship, the slopes and valleys  like the curl of his palm. He felt eyes on him.

                "Wanna know how long you've been staring at that number?"

                Erwin smiled softly. "No. My pride couldn't bear it."

                The captain stood and merged their stacks. He tapped on a rebellious sheet that refused to slide into the block with the rest, rounded the desk and shoved the pile in a drawer. "It bore a lot today."

                Torrential rains conspired with a pitiful budget to ensure their worst expedition in two seasons. They mourned their brightest soldiers and youngest recruits by scrubbing them out of the grooves in their buckles and the beds of their nails.

                "Even I have limits, captain," Erwin said. Levi shut the drawer. He didn't move.

                _Forget about it_ , he said when Erwin called him aside the morning after that night. _Whatever_ , he said when Erwin thanked him. It struck him after the fact that the captain may have regretted touching him. He made no mention of it in the two weeks since. Erwin followed suit.

                "Do you?" Levi said, but it was so soft that he may have only exhaled. Erwin watched the scar ripple over his knuckles as he rapped distractedly on the desk. He wanted to trace that pale thread.

                "You got a limit on how many people you're willing to throw away?"

                The temperature dropped. Erwin had forgotten to shed his jacket but even the coarse weave was little comfort. Levi moved behind him. Hands fell on his shoulders and pulled. Erwin leaned back and he couldn't remember when he was last so obedient, when he last wanted to be.

                Erwin remembered the squad leader they had lost not five hours ago. He remembered all three pieces.

                "No," he said.

                The hands fell away. He was sure he imagined that they had lingered. They had no reason to.

                Erwin watched him over the next few days. He watched his hands. He watched them curl in salute to the soldiers lost and console the souls left behind. He watched them pat his mare's flank and scrub the grime from his gear. He watched them grip the rim of his cup, only the rim.

                He was reviewing medical records one afternoon in preparation for the next set of expeditions, a series of minor scouting trips which will map the remainder of a gorge which had consistently delayed travel between one castle checkpoint and the next. He didn't notice the oil burning out. He didn't hear the knock.

                "What are these?" Levi asked. He plucked a file from the stack. Erwin didn't remember sending him in. 

                "Adler has a broken ankle again," Erwin muttered. He finished skimming the last page and marked the soldier down. "Is there something you ne-"

                "What are these?"

                Erwin drew another file. "Medical reports from the last expedition. They need to be dated and confirmed."

                "Schmitt does that."

                "Franz is no longer with us." He opened the file. Iris Kippler. Broken ribs. Missing leg.

                "Eisner, then."

                "Nadine is no longer with us." William Harold. Herniated disc.

                "You get a kick out of grunt work or something?"

                "These are sensitive items." Raymond Decker. Missing arms.

                 A hand landed on the stack. Erwin looked up.

                "See that?" Levi said. He pointed to a large volume sitting lonesome on the top shelf across the room. "I need it."

                Erwin squinted. "An outdated third edition biography of the Fletcher noble family?"

                Levi exhaled heavily through his nose. Erwin watched his lips purse around his "Sure."

                "It's yours," Erwin said. He tugged at the next file. It wouldn't budge.

                Erwin looked from the captain's unreadable face to the high shelf. It was unlike him to be at once so forward and yet not so. The commander rose and strode across the room.  His shoulder crackled as he reached for the peeling spine.

                He strode back pushing memories of another kind of spine from his mind and Erwin was sure Levi's hold was solid before he let go but the book tumbled all the same. He knelt to pick it up and as he crouched, the captain watched him. As he stood, the captain watched him. He passed the book and the captain watched him.

                Levi put it on his desk and the way he let it slide just so from his fingertips confirmed that he hadn't even a cursory interest in the thing.

                "Still there," Levi muttered. He drew a chair and pulled half of the files towards himself. Erwin didn't ask what he meant.

                With the work halved, the sky was yet breathing its last when they finished. The sunset spilled into the office and painted them gold. Erwin rubbed his neck absently. Three expeditions. Three strike teams. Three weeks. The financial year ended in one month and so they had no choice but to exhaust their remaining budget and squeeze expeditions into a breathlessly tight time frame to avoid massive cuts the following year. They did not have enough soldiers for three separate teams. If one suffered spectacularly, the second will begin at a disadvantage, and the third more so. Erwin unlocked a drawer and withdrew inventory records and formation revisions. He thanked the captain for his assistance and dismissed him. The door shut with a soft click.

                 She wasn't fast enough. She was tired, he knew she tired the way he pushed her, the way he punished her. The ground shook. His heart jolted in the cage of his chest and she was too slow, her breath coming in shocked spurts and her mane bloodied and matted. It ran through his fingers like silk just hours ago. The ground shook again and she was whole just hours ago. Fingers closed around his neck.

                Erwin jolted awake. His eyes shot open, but he stared into nothing.  He flinched at a sudden weight on his shoulder.

                "'S just me," he heard.

                The moon abandoned him that night. She sent the void instead.

                "Someone once told me," the voice said, "that they have limits."

                Shapes jostled in front of him. Black on black. His ear was hot from bearing his weight in the cradle of his arms.

                "Mm," he said absently. "Who?"

                "Someone who acts like he has none. Get up."


	3. The Promise

                His breath hovered in his throat. He reached for the slender fingers as they curled around the seam of his neck and shoulders and he knew he had made a mistake long before they had brushed. The captain left as wordlessly as he came.

                Twenty percent casualties. One third of the gorge was mapped.

                He gripped his own thighs to anchor his traitorous hands and wondered aloud if anyone else had the pleasure of enjoying these attentions and he swore he'd spoken as diplomatically as to the king but the captain left all the same. It was for the best, the commander thought in the fading light. It was for the best, he thought when reason insisted that cutting out his own tongue would be more troublesome in the long term.

                Forty percent causalities. Four-fifths of the gorge was mapped.

                His gear was still damp from the rains when the captain lingered after the post expedition meeting with squad leaders. His wounds still bled hot into his bandages and his throat lay in ribbons from the weight of moving armies with his lungs and still he froze when the captain took the first of those familiar steps and disappeared behind his back and still he sighed when he reappeared in his hair and still his eyes flickered shut when he pulled him flush with his chair and kneaded beasts and investors and figures and bones from his  temples, from his brow.

                There were not enough able soldiers for a third expedition.

                Erwin groaned and it was a little too broken and a little too raw and he feared the honest sound would bode an honest end to whatever this was but the captain found that spot again and he pressed like he wanted an encore and he got one and he got one again.

                Investors arrived from Sina the morning after they returned from the second and final expedition of the season. They strode past hobbling soldiers and congratulated the commander on a job well done.

                Erwin held another meeting in his office to confirm next year's budget distribution. The oil burned as Hange took the floor and refused to yield for five refills. As they spoke, a draft blew into the space, an aborted gale looking for a storm that had long since broken. Still, Nanaba shivered, and Levi volunteered to shut the window. The captain moved behind him. Erwin found his breath again only when Levi returned to his seat.

                The captain scoffed softly when the rest were dismissed. "Catching a titan? What's next, the moon?"

                "Yes. Then the sun."      

                "You'll need more rope."

                "I'll put in an order."

                Levi stood. He rounded the desk. "Where will you stash it?"

                "We'll clear the east courtyard."

                "It'll be hot."

                "Then we'd better stay hydrated."

                Levi watched him. A band of light fell on the curve of his jaw, the slope of his lips. For a second, his eyes glanced on the Fletcher biography on Erwin's desk. He clicked his tongue and left.

                Levi traveled with him to the graduation ceremony.  It was Erwin's first speech as commander to potential recruits. Shadis clapped him on the back afterward, said he'd never seen so many join. Erwin stayed behind to listen to a grieving mother. Her third and last son wore his brothers' wings.

                Their driver fell ill. Erwin insisted they rest for the night. He put them up in a modest inn and pretended not to hear when Levi suspected that he paid from his own pocket. Erwin spread the expedition revisions he'd brought along across the tiny, chipped desk and lit the lamp.

                There was a knock. He knew it now, knew it like he knew his own heartbeat. Two raps, sharp. Low on the door, near the knob. Then another pair, louder. If he counted the seconds between the two, he could predict the draw of his brow, the line of his lips. Erwin drew away from the desk. He shouldn't bloat his mind with nonsense.

                Levi brushed past him before the door had fully opened. "I'm moving these," he warned, and when Erwin said nothing, Levi brushed the sheets aside and placed a cup on the desk's uneven surface. Erwin thanked him as he rubbed the afterglare of black lines on white sheets from his eyes. Levi opened his mouth to speak when his eye caught on something on the pages. Erwin brought the tea to his lips as Levi made a disgusted noise.

                "What's this," Levi said, and violently cast the sheet aside, "a zoo?"

                "Holding pens."

                "You're supposed to be sl-" Levi listed through the other sheets. "-fuck." Levi ran his hand through his hair. Erwin set the cup down.

                "When we subdue one," Erwin began, "we can't afford any-"

                "Sit."

                "-mistakes. Once the squad formations are-"

                The captain strode behind him, hooked a finger in his tie and pulled. Erwin felt himself drawn backward until the back of his knees hit something solid. Another yank pulled him into a chair.

                "Levi-" he started warningly, but there were hands on his collar and he couldn't remember what he meant to say when the fabric cut into his throat, when it had been weeks since he'd touched him.

                "You're killing yourself," Levi said lowly. "And you're doing it so fucking slowly I almost," he said, tightening his grip on the collar, "want to save you the trouble."

                Erwin couldn't help the soft laugh that he knew would do nothing to pacify the captain.

                "Not yet. When the war is won-"

                "If your shitty back lasts that long-"

                "-you can do as you please."

                Silence. Levi released his hold on Erwin's collar. Erwin resigned himself to his umpteenth mistake and expected to hear another wordless withdrawal, another shutting door. He didn't see the blade.

                Levi buried one hand in his hair and flipped a switchblade open with the other. Erwin sighed as the tip traced the sweep of his collarbone, the dip in his throat. It crossed over his pulse and lingered for a moment. Levi's grip loosened as if he meant to watch his pounding blood move steel.

                "As I please?" Levi said. The tip dragged lazily up his throat. Erwin swallowed and the flat of it dipped with the undulation, rose with it. It threaded over his jaw and pressed at his bottom lip as if inviting him to answer.

                "Anything," Erwin said without thinking.  The flat of the blade remained on his lip. He pursed his lips against it without thinking.

                Erwin's grip tightened on his thighs as the blade snapped shut near his ear. The sound was deafening. He moved to lean forward, to turn, to act, but the hand in his hair remained and it was no less yielding than the steel in the other.

                "Anything," Levi echoed. Pale, lithe fingers skirted over his jaw in a repeat performance and when Erwin shut his eyes he could almost imagine the blade returning five-fold, but not when they teased the seam of his lips, not when Erwin felt old calluses, not when he committed the new to memory.

                They traced the lines of his neck and grazed past stubble with his knuckles but they returned to his lips and he wondered at the throaty gasp at his ear, wondered why Levi hadn't imagined he'd ever part his lips and take one into his mouth and hum as it slid inside until it couldn't anymore.

                Erwin closed his teeth around the tip and maybe it was cocky to think his other hand wouldn't close around his throat and squeeze until his jaw opened and his face flushed.

                Warm air spilled over his ear. "Spar with me tomorrow," Levi said and the captain was mistaken if he thought a whisper hid the shudders in his chest. Erwin sighed as his lip dragged over the rim, as he suffered a vengeful nip.


	4. The Relic

 

                A blow glanced off Erwin's arm. Levi ducked behind him. He was fast. He had been fast for two hours. Erwin was no stranger to hand to hand. He could best Mike on a good day. Levi wasn't Mike.

                Another blow landed on his back, and still he couldn't see him. Levi ducked again. Each time Erwin came close to estimating where to strike to match his pace, Levi quickened or slowed to throw him off. Erwin struck again and Levi's body  all but split in two to avoid the hit. Shock lanced through him as he feared Levi had torn or strained or broken something to bend so far backward before a hard sweep of his leg caught Erwin off balance  and introduced his back to the mat.

                Blood thundered in his ears as Levi threw him his flask. Erwin sat up and drank. He set it aside and meant to stand but for Levi, whose toes barely brushed his chest. He let Levi urge him back onto the mat.

                Levi drew his shirt over his head. Erwin chanced a glance at the locked door of the sparring room as the captain balled up the shirt, mopped his brow and set it aside.

                "It's lower," Levi said. A line of sweat swept past the sharp line of his jaw and ran the length of his throat. Sunlight curled around the lines of his hips and lit the fine hairs at his navel.

                "What is?" Erwin asked distantly.

                Levi stretched. Erwin watched the sinuous roll of his abdomen. There was a fresh scar on his chest. It had healed unevenly.

                "Forget why we're here, commander?"

                Levi crouched and gestured for Erwin to sit up. His back twitched as Levi's hand skirted across. It was still warm and damp from exertion, but Levi made no comment, did not even curl his lip in distaste. He tapped twice on the small of his back.

                "There," he said, and Erwin must have imagined that his voice had taken on something a little lower, a little rougher. "I'll get a medic to-"

                "A medic? It's that serious?"

                "Don't interrupt. And no."

                Erwin waited for more.

                Levi scoffed and stood. He gathered his things. "They know their shit, alright?"

                Erwin rose to his feet. Levi turned at the sound. Erwin drew a towel from his bag and dragged it across his brow, his throat. Levi watched him.

                "You're right. I've taken too much of your time as it is-"

                "Ten, your quarters."

                "Levi-" Erwin said, but Levi had already left.

                The day crawled. Erwin hosted several meetings addressed to investors in t he afternoon and in the evening negotiated the terms of their next expedition with Hange. He apologized at interrupting them rather abruptly when he noticed they had talked him thirty minutes past a certain appointment. Hange scooped up their diagrams and vowed to return first thing in the morning.

                His steps echoed on the cold stone. His heart hammered, and he felt childish. A tremor laced through his hands.

                Levi was leaning beside  the doorframe as he rounded a corner.

                "Hange?"

                "Hange," Erwin confirmed.

                Levi said nothing. His strides were a degree slower as he followed Erwin inside. His ear twitched as Erwin locked it behind them, as if the sound was too sharp, too loud. He rounded the study before disappearing into the adjacent bedroom. Just when Erwin decided Levi had no reservations after all, he reappeared and asked for the supply closet.  

                Levi cleaned Erwin's quarters for two hours. The commander insisted that he help, but Levi all but ordered him stay put.

                Erwin returned with tea as the second hour drew to a close. Erwin watched him loosen the cloth covering his mouth, then the one in his hair. Erwin felt the phantom taps on his back from that morning. Two taps. Two hours.

                  _Two raps, sharp. Low on the door, near the knob. Then another pair, louder._

                Levi took the cup with a muttered thanks and a line at his brow. Erwin shut the door again. Levi leaned a hip against the desk in his study, then shifted and leaned on the other.

_"Anything," Erwin said without thinking._

_"Anything," Levi echoed._

                It could be nothing. Watching someone else clean your quarters and forbid you from either helping or catching up on any other sort of work was less than stimulating. He was imagining things.

                "Levi," Erwin said. Levi looked up.

                It could be nothing.

                "Levi," Erwin echoed, softer. Levi lowered his cup. His eyes sharpened. The commander set his own cup down. "I won't think any less of you if you've changed your mind-"

                "That's not it," he snapped. He looked away. "I won't work in filth. I'll need another hour just to-" He trailed off as Erwin strode past him, hands halfway down the buttons on his shirt. He passed into his bedroom, shrugged it off his shoulders and threw it over the footboard. The bed creaked softly under his weight.

                The rooms were silent. The clouds parted and the moon pooled into the room. Levi must have slipped out. It was for the better. Erwin had been too forward. The captain had extended an honest hand, one Erwin had bitten in more ways than one, and for what, he couldn't say. For once, he pursued blindly. Maybe he wasn't pursuing at all. His thoughts crackled in and out of focus as sleep drew his eyes shut.

                A floorboard creaked. Then again. He turned as Levi stood by the foot of the bed and folded his shirt.

                "Levi, you don't hav-"

                "Shut up, god, shut up."

                The bed dipped beneath his knee as Levi swung his other leg over Erwin's hips. Erwin turned away from the wall and caught the unlit lamp on the nightstand, but when he felt familiar hands settle at his nape, he couldn't remember why it mattered.

                Levi started at his neck and kneaded at his shoulders but his hands were tentative, his touch guarded. He lingered there and palmed more than anything, as if Erwin had suddenly become glass. Then he stopped. Erwin opened his eyes as Levi shifted above him. He settled at the small of his back and when his hands returned, they pressed just so that Erwin trapped his lip between his teeth and tasted iron.

                He heard an amused huff above him as Levi redoubled his efforts. He traced a scar as he trailed lower. Erwin suffered a full bodied shudder as Levi found a point that lit his nerves and stole his breath.  

                "Wait, Levi."

                Levi stopped.

                "Okay, Erwin."

                Levi raked his fingernails over his back as Erwin came down. He chased his sighs with hands that felled beasts.

                As his hands crept up his spine, the moon crumbled to a sliver and Erwin remembered why the lamp mattered. Levi slapped his hand away as he shifted to reach it and forced from him a sound that was almost a growl.

                The room was mercilessly black when Levi sat up on his hips and braced himself with a hand on Erwin's thigh. His soft pants joined Erwin's deep, lingering sighs.

                "We should have used another room," Erwin said, and it was a whisper and it was all too loud.

                "It's not the room."

                Levi didn't elaborate right away. Erwin didn't press. He listened to their breathing. Finally, Levi shifted. Erwin tensed as a finger trailed under his jaw.

                "It's been a year, but-" He started, and Erwin turned sharply onto his back . Levi hissed as he was nearly thrown.               

                It was a relic of a cut that bled and healed by a man who bled and healed and spilled so much more that Erwin would suffer a thousand marks more if Levi willed it. Erwin could not even recall under which ear the scar remained.  Levi hadn't even needed his eyes.

                "I didn't think for a second-" Erwin began severely.

                "I know," he heard, and the voice rumbled knowingly, but it didn't understand. Levi didn't understand. Erwin would suffer a thousand, a million more.

                "Who would I be if I send you to slaughter and in return couldn't even turn my ba-"

                Levi's hands returned, this time to his mouth.

                "I know."

 


	5. The Offer

                Levi returned once a week. He returned at the same time, in the same clothes, in the same light of a candle's barely-there flicker. It was for secrecy's sake, Erwin reasoned, but the same measures that gave them some amount of privacy had also made the arrangement unbearably intimate.

                The effect seemed to be lost on Levi. He arrived and left with as much ceremony as he'd arrive and leave with had he still been dragging the heel of his palms against Erwin's nape in his office. Some nights, they hadn't exchanged a single word. Erwin didn't mind.

                He was grateful that Levi came to him, grateful beyond reason that the hot flash of pain in the small of his back lessened with each week that passed with Levi's attentions. No, he minded and feared his own wandering, wondering thoughts. He wondered whether that light brush by the shell of his ear was a suggestion, whether the lithe, calloused fingers tracing the scars falling in and out of the valley of his spine weren't asking a question and he recalled the pale light in that capitol inn and the taste of him in his mouth and he wondered if Levi wanted more.

                The captain was spare with his words, but not with his gestures. Hange was never not physical, nor Mike averse to the odd pat on the back, and to each of them or any other, Levi only grumbled or said nothing at all. Yet when Erwin chanced a hand on the shoulder, the back, or the arm - innocent, fleeting touches - each one was met with a twitch, a shudder, a light slap. It was as clear an answer as Levi could offer, so Erwin respected it. He hushed his thrumming blood when nails grazed through his scalp. He smothered sighs into his sheets when Levi shifted over him, when his hips rocked into his back.

                Levi's hands became knives and coals. The commander began to pray for the evening's end and dread the next before the door even shut. If he couldn't trust himself not only to act but think professionally, he didn't deserve what Levi offered.

                Erwin settled his affairs in his office on the night before an expedition. He thought it wise to give the next commander an efficient start should he not return. It had become something of a ritual. A posthumous letter of congratulations in the first drawer. Corps intelligence in the third.           

                On one such night, he stayed late. Much had been done since the last expedition. The office was filled with the mute flicker of the lamp and the scratching of his pen.

                Sometime into the night, the captain let himself in and perched wordlessly on his desk. He knew the ritual as well as Erwin. He waited.

                Erwin's pen came to a stop. He sealed the letter in an envelope, returned everything to its place, and leaned back. He watched Levi worry a chip in the wood.

                Levi shifted. "Done?"

                Erwin nodded.

                Levi stood and turned to the door. "I'll meet you there."

                "Levi."

                The captain turned. He was rubbing his hands. He looked almost eager.

                Erwin stood and busied his hands with retrieving his coat. "I'm beyond grateful for your attentions. I've never," he said, picking a spot of lint from the sleeve that might not have been there at all, "felt more control in the air. I only wonder-" He watched Levi's hands still as Erwin draped the coat over one arm.

                "-am I still listing?"

                Levi would say yes. Erwin would suggest getting a second opinion, suggest consulting a medic proper. He hated having to be so roundabout about it, but he greatly preferred a little running around over inadvertently insulting him. Erwin locked the office door and walked the captain to his quarters.

                "No."

                Erwin slowed. He looked over. Levi was unreadable.

                "You haven't for a while."

                Erwin laughed softly. It figured. He had anticipated every scenario but the best.

                "That's great news," he said earnestly. He stopped at the door to the captain's quarters. "I don't know how I can ever return the-"

                "Forget it." The captain frowned at his door. "Why're we stopping? Forget what day it is?"

                "I won't steal any more of your time, captain. I imagine you're relieved to have a free evening again. Goodnight."

                Erwin returned to his own quarters. The captain didn't follow.  

                The expedition was a failure. They could not successfully capture a titan but they were one attempt smarter and the casualty rate was far lower than anticipated, so some soldiers celebrated all the same. Erwin drifted from one boisterous group to another to help Hange recruit advance teams that might better flank their target and prevent another escape. By night's end, his ear's rang with salutes for their fallen soldiers.

                His blood chilled when he realized he hadn't seen the captain anywhere that night. The commander was somewhat placated when he remembered seeing him passing back through the gates with the rest of them. The captain's preference for solitude and quiet made him something of a ghost in the days following expeditions.

                He couldn't find the captain to extend an invitation to join him, so Erwin ate alone. He listened to the grounds gradually quieting from the office windows. He watched the falling sun play on the distant 3DMG training platform. He never could understand how expertly the captain moved in the air, how he shamed clairvoyants with nearly supernatural perception. Erwin caught the barest glimpse of him that day as he held their perimeter against a pair of twenty-meters. He twisted and curved from one to the other, avoiding swinging arms and kicking feet as if they hadn't moved at all.

                Erwin passed a group of soldiers as he moved to his quarters. They saluted gaily and went on their way, jostling and teasing.               

                His mind played that barely-there glimpse for him through the night and into the next day. He heard the gear's hiss when he gave the post-expedition address. He saw Levi ride currents like waves as he made preparations for the following expedition.

                Erwin's hands wandered to the Corps personnel files. He wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to find.

                They had soldiers of Levi's height and weight, past and current. His success wasn't a matter of composition or speed, then. It wasn't a function of time, either. He replaced the files and returned to his letters, eager to shake the insistent tangents from his mind.

                He tapped idly as he prepared a new letter. He rapped twice in succession. A break. Twice again.

                                  _Two raps, sharp. Low on the door, near the knob. Then another pair, louder._

                His hand stilled.

                Everything paired to comfort, to make sense of the senseless. He recalled the man's infinitesimally short reaction time in the air. He recalled, too, how effortlessly Levi read his soldiers, how expertly he calmed or praised or disciplined them. All at once, it came to him, how much the captain must truly see, hear, smell. How much he must feel. Each twitch in a titan's flank, every worry on a recruit's face, every mote of dust catching on a sleeve, a thread, an eyelash.

                Erwin recalled his own chanced touches and they were brutish to him now. They might have been barely-there to another soldier, but Levi wasn't another soldier. Maybe he had expected Erwin to understand. He should have understood. It shouldn't have taken so long to understand.

                That he ended their meetings was his only consolation. Levi had so far been indifferent to the change, but Erwin imagined he, too, had begun looking for a way to end them.

                A week passed so bloated with meetings with nobles and financial advisors that the commander didn't mourn its passing. The day when he and the captain would have met came and went without ceremony. Erwin pretended he didn't remember it.

                The razor rasped against his neck. The sky had lightened since he woke, but reveille was still some time away. He washed and patted himself dry, ran the washcloth along his jaw. It came away with a streak of red. Erwin blinked away heads splitting like ripened fruit and dressed the cut as someone knocked. Two raps, sharp. Low on the door, near the knob. Then another pair, louder.

                He placed the washcloth at the edge of the sink and adjusted the collar on his shirt. As he passed over the buttons, he glanced again at the rumpled cloth.  The knock came again. Something possessed him to abandon the last few buttons to fold the washcloth.

                Levi uncrossed and recrossed his arms as Erwin opened the door.

                "Captain. Is something wrong?"

                Levi scoffed. "Would I have waited for you to finish raising the fourth wall in there if there was?"

                "No," Erwin said easily, "I suppose not."

                Levi shifted his weight, and if he were anyone else, Erwin might think he was nervous.  

                "Can I-" Levi started, then shook it off and said, "You gonna let me in?"

                Levi entered and passed a hand over his books as Erwin shut the door. He did the same with his other hand, though he looked away. Erwin wondered if it was automatic.  The captain crossed his arms again. He watched the sun rise.

                "You'll start listing again."

                Erwin's hand stilled where he raised it to adjust his right cuff. "I'm sorry?"

                "I know the insects up north've got you nailed to your desk. Fine. But leave it alone and the problem'll come back."

                Erwin adjusted his left cuff. "If it proves to be persistent, I'll take it to the medics-"

                Levi exhaled sharply. "When. When it comes back."

                "What would you have me do?" Erwin threw on his jacket and adjusted the lapels.

                Levi turned away from the window to look at him. Sunlight poured behind him and Erwin couldn't quite see his face in the glare. Levi's voice was low when he spoke, but not soft.

                "Why'd you call it off?"

                Erwin buckled the harness strap across his chest and slipped on his tie. "I've been a captain myself, Levi, I know how little downtime-"

                Levi stepped forward. Sunlight shifted on the slope of his nose, the bow of his lip.

                "That it? The only reason?"

                "Yes."

                "Then don't worry about it." His foot began to tap.

                "It wouldn't be right to take so much of your ti-"

                "Take it," Levi barked. It was an almost-shout and something raw and unrestrained and Levi's eyes widened as if he hadn't expected it either. He dropped his eyes. They caught on something.

                He reached forward and adjusted Erwin's tie. The sun glanced on the stone and draped Levi's hands in green and almost-blue and Erwin read his lips as his voice drowned in the first notes of reveille,

                "Take it." 


	6. The Scratches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: descriptions of amputation

 

                An aberrant shut its maw on the captain's wires. They snapped taut and he hurtled into another, into its mouth. Between one blink and the next, he had plunged into the beast's gullet and sliced out of its distended belly. He did away with the surrounding horde and limped to his horse.

                The commander had been coordinating an advance team half a mile away. He heard the story from a dozen mouths as soldiers darted about the infirmary at headquarters. He rolled his sleeves back over the dressed abrasions on his hands and arms and raised his voice to thank the nurse over the squelch and grind of amputation saws.

                A doctor flew to him as Erwin passed through the wards, shoved a folder to his chest and hollered something over her shoulder as she left just as quickly to accommodate another wave of incoming wounded. His skinned palms flared under their dressings as he opened the folder. He frowned at the numbers. Again, they were returning with more wounded than anticipated. Again, bandages had to be rationed. Again, the rising stench of stale whiskey announced the end of however few drums of anesthetic the budget allowed. As Erwin rushed out of the infirmary to instruct able squad leaders to organize teams to comb the city for supplies, a scuffle started in an adjacent ward.

                The commander waved down a passing soldier and relayed his orders as three others struggled to keep a man from thrashing out of his bed. Tears streaked his twisting face. Exposed nerves danced from both ends of his half-bitten arm.

                " _I need it I need it I need it_ -"

                As Erwin approached the man, their eyes caught and he stiffened. "Commander," he said and the fingers of that doomed hand twitched as if to form a fist, as if to salute.

                "Don't let them, sir," he mumbled. "Don't-" He squirmed as the soldiers took advantage of his distraction to strap restraints across his middle, his legs, his neck. "I have to fly," he pleaded,  I need to-"

                "Does a body need a heart, Williams?"

                The question stilled even the doctor's hands for a moment. Williams stared. He flinched as a nurse tightened the tourniquet.

                "Fourth transradial in a row -" a nurse muttered.

                "Trans _humeral_ , Adams, wake up," the doctor barked and tapped halfway down the shoulder.

                Williams jolted at the touch. The leather creaked dangerously  as he twisted under his binds. Erwin placed a hand on his other shoulder and the man turned back to him. His chest heaved.

                "I can't... they can't take my arm-"

                "I need an answer, Williams."

                His brow furrowed in thought. He relaxed against the binds. "Course it does," he huffed.

                "Does it need lungs?"

                "Bone fragments," the doctor muttered and wheeled over a metal tray. Williams caught the glint of a pinzette. Erwin caught his jaw before he could turn his head.

                "Yes, it- YES," He yelled to the accompanying clinks of bone on metal.

                "Does it need blood, a brain, does it need all its million nerves?"

                "Yes, yes, y- it could do without the last one right now," Williams sputtered and the commander smiled. Williams returned it. He nearly laughed. The doctor glanced up meaningfully and Erwin nodded. He moved his hand to grip the man's left.

                "Is the Survey Corps not like a body," Erwin went on, "with a head, with eyes and ears, with a heart, with a soul?"

                Williams throat worked. He nodded.

                "Then why do you insist it need only arms and legs?"

                Williams shook his head. "I didn't-"

                "The troops are our limbs, but who makes their blades? Who trains their horses and mends their wounds, who are its blood and bones?"

                A beat passed in silence. A distant scream rippled through it.

                "You will not fly again," he said. The soldier's eyes shut. He didn't move but for the welling tears bulging from the snare of his eyelashes.

                "But you will fight. You offered your heart," he said, and moved the man's hand to his chest.  "You will fight."

                He stilled. Only his mouth moved, trembled.

                "Yours will be the fastest horses," Erwin said, "the sharpest blades, the shortest routes. You'll be our blood, our bones, our heart."

                It was in the man's silence, and the doctor's, and the nurses', that he noticed the other rooms, too, hushed to carry his oaths.

                Williams sniffed and glanced longingly at a nearby bottle. Erwin passed it and watched the doctors sever the remaining tendons and ligaments as Williams drank and when there was nothing more to drink, he whined low in his throat and rubbed the harsh bandage into the raw flesh of Erwin's hand in his grip and yet Erwin stayed and yet his knuckles ground together as he watched the arm part from its owner and its fingers release their final salute.

                That evening, Erwin dictated post-expedition notes in his office. As he scheduled a number of appearances and meetings in Sina, Nifa's breathing grew more labored. Erwin ordered her to stand. She obeyed. Her eyes tightened.

                "You said you sustained no injuries."

                "Correct, sir."

                The commander considered her a moment longer. Her chest fluttered unevenly. She lifted her chin, playing at confidence.

                "Dismissed."

                "Sir," she started, eyes darting to his bandaged palms.

                "Dismissed."

                She gathered her things. "Should I send in another-"

                "No."

                The door shut, and Erwin completed the remaining documentation. Bruised ribs, he guessed, as his dressings bloomed red at the strain.

                The commander supervised the conversion of a portion of the barracks into additional infirmary units well past nightfall. He thanked the city doctors that had come to volunteer their services and took no offense that they were as wary to meet him as he was relieved to see them. Doctors do not take kindly to the live wire that stops their patient's heart either.

                As he returned to his quarters to pack for his ride to the capitol, a savage sting ran the length of his arms. He knelt to recover the files he'd dropped. A shadow fell over them and a boot descended on the folders and dragged them out of reach. He looked up as the captain shot a look at his hands, picked up the files and went on his way without a word. Erwin followed him to his door and opened his mouth to offer a good night before the captain strode inside as silently as before.

                Levi threw the files on his desk and shed his jacket. Erwin remained at the threshold. Levi noticed.

                "Forget where the lock is?"

                Erwin shut the door. "You're a day early."

                "You're leaving tomorrow."

                "We're leaving tomorrow."

                Levi gave an amused huff. "I saw your schedule," he said as he folded his jacket over the back of a chair. "I take it you plan to sleep between the time it takes to sit down and open your mouth at these meetings, yeah?"

                "The ride from one donor to another is enough to-"

                "Nevermind," Levi snapped, and Erwin heard the fissures in his voice, the gravel lining his words.

                "We're doing this today," Levi said and frowned as if it wounded him to spell it out, "because if you make time for it between all the ass you gotta lick on this traveling circus then I'm a titan's bastard." Levi retrieved a vial of oil from his jacket and crossed into the bedroom before Erwin could speak.

                "Levi," he called. When he received no answer, he considered ordering him to appear. He considered until the lamplight dimmed and a restless tap began, he didn't know where. Twice in succession, a beat, then twice again.

                Levi had left before the last notes of reveille blared across the compound. Erwin too, cleared his mind to give the morning address and direct pre-expedition preparations. He wondered if the captain also did not return to this little spot they had sequestered for the other in their minds until this moment, to this space where one only had eyes and ears and hands for the other and there were no titans and no budgets and no words.

                When Erwin passed into the bedroom, he caught Levi's boot descending before he stilled and nodded to the bed.

                The lamplight was so dim it may as well not flicker at all. He hadn't rolled his sleeves to his elbows as he'd always done. Erwin watched him warm the oil between his palms as he removed his shirt and lay on his front. The bed sank beneath his knees as Levi hopped over him and ran his hands across his sinking shoulders and raked his nails along his neck.

                The oil had a pleasant, natural scent, a odor like rustling pines and morning dew. The curtains billowed softly.    

                "Stop thinking," Levi said.

                Erwin smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "Am I so transparent?"

                "You're quiet."

                Erwin's ears flushed. Levi had made so little mention of the sounds he made - none at all, to his memory - that he had stopped hearing them himself.

                "I didn't see your name in the infirmary roster."

                "For scratches?" Levi said lowly. "When legs are being hacked off at the hip?" His hands kneaded down the slope of his lower back. Erwin shifted to peer behind him. His eye caught on the red blotches on the captain's sleeves, the scarlet too sharp, too violent for the shadows to hide.

                "Scratches," Erwin said humorlessly. Levi followed his eye and swore.

                "Stay," Levi ordered as he hopped off the bed and made for the other room. Erwin heard rummaging. He must have brought a change of dressing. He must have known it would be too much.

                Erwin rose and padded to the adjoining room as Levi feverishly rewrapped his arms.

                "Get back," Levi said without turning, "we're not finished."

                "We are," Erwin said, and with such finality that Levi turned and knocked the soiled bandages from the desk. He pinned the dressing to one arm, snatched the old dressings from the floor, and started on the other. The cotton kept slipping out of the gauze.

                "Watched those dumb fucks," he muttered as he rearranged the cotton for the third time, "eat an entire squad. I wasn't too late. I was there. I was right fucking there-" he said as Erwin came to him and steadied the cotton underdressing, "-and they still, they-"   

                Erwin moved Levi's hand away before he made a bigger mess of the binds and finished them himself.

                "Go," Erwin said.

                Levi didn't move. He stilled like Williams had, corpselike. Erwin raised his hand to his shoulder. Panic lanced through him as his hand brushed the captain's neck and settled on the collar of his shirt before he recalled that the captain was less than appreciative of such gestures.

                But he didn't flinch, didn't slap his hand away, didn't frown.

                "Something," Levi said lowly, "needs to go right today. _Something_ -"

                Erwin squeezed. Levi didn't flinch.

                "Something..."


	7. The Benefactor

                The duck was cooked perfectly. Erwin gave his compliments to the chef and the lord of the manor took it upon himself to cap his comment with an extravagant retelling of how generous he was to raise thieves and whores from the underground to make his meals and polish his silver. Erwin felt more than saw Levi freeze beside him. Having learned his lesson in a prior incident, Erwin ordered him to see to some invented errand and went on with the dinner. He didn't turn to catch the look Levi undoubtedly gave him. The lord's wife watched him leave.

                The salads were extraordinary. A diet of military rations encouraged one to forget that leaves crunch, that spices nip and simmer on the tongue. Erwin played up their next expedition, their first of the new year after a necessary break for the winter chill to pass. The lord and his wife listened, not immune to Erwin's command of his words, his presence, but the spell was broken with the arrival of each course and time and again, the portly man revisited the subject of his too-generous heart in this too-ungrateful city. Erwin nodded along and complimented him at every turn, the motions politely practiced, artfully timed.

                The lord chewed sloppily. Spittle rained on tomato flesh smeared jade plates, red on green. Mid-chew, Erwin felt it again, that little quirk every Corps soldier pretends not to have. His own grinding, crunching teeth echoed in his ears. His throat tightened as he swallowed the meat. The commander dropped his eyes, knew if they passed a single mashing jaw, his gut would roil. Spittle rained on human flesh smeared jade fields, red on green.

                That little diversion cost him a smile or a wink that might have proved this last visit useful. The lord promised this and that, but Erwin knew what an empty promise sounded like - he had heard all the variations, all the flavors of it. He had heard them for a straight week. He will ride back to headquarters with not a penny to show for his efforts. The Corps will forgo heating and winter coats. Rations will be halved again.

                A servant escorted the commander through the spacious front courtyard and past carved ivory gates. Before it closed behind him, he heard a third voice.

                "Not yet, Christina. Go inside, darling."

                The lord's wife invited him back inside for a parting stroll. Golds and reds fluttered across the stone courtyard as they passed arm in arm between wraithlike trees. The wife or even mistress of the lords who entertained his fundraising efforts often saw him out with a word or a gift, a just-there blush never far from their pale necks. One bloomed on her then, but the commander wagered it was the chill that painted her. Another pale neck flirted with his thoughts, not slender but corded, not framed in satin and lace but bound in a war of scratchy lapels and white cloth. He willed it from his mind.

                They didn't share a word. The dry rustle of curling leaves and the hard echo of their steps on cobblestone paths sang for them. It wouldn't do to interrupt.

                They came again to the gates and the commander performed the necessary goodbyes, the your home is lovely's and thank you for your hospitality's but it was mid we hope to see to see you again that he at last made something of the scattered impressions the evening offered him.

                The woman beside him was not the demure, subservient sort he often dined with in all his visits to the capitol's lords and councilmen. She did not once apologize, did not once ask but demand. Her table manners had been impeccable, but her appetite, carnivorous. Not once, she had whispered in her husband's ear not long before figures and dates tumbled sloppily out of his mouth, the sound of them foreign on his tongue. The commander may yet return next season to this very manor and petition them again, or he may suggest something that may forbid him from coming to this lord or any lord ever again.

                He offered his last goodbye and waited for the customary curtsy, the favored parting gesture of noble ladies.

                She offered her hand.

                He shook it, but he didn't let go.

                "If I may, Madam, I haven't had the pleasure of hearing your decision," he said.

                She gave him a wonderfully crafted look of surprise. "You jest, commander. My dear husband cuts the ribbons and signs the checks. Who am I to give you such a thing?"

                The commander ignored the klaxons in his head begging him to withdraw, to apologize for speaking out of turn, to salvage the mistake. He bowed, instead, to draw her yielding hand to his lips.

                "You are the vision who chooses which checks to sign, which ribbons to cut."

                Unsmiling, she held his gaze for precious moments before one emerged, one he hadn't seen in mixed company, a beautiful, predatory thing.  "Good boy," she said. "Keith shoulda brought your ass along back when he did his rounds in this part of town, woulda gotten my coin years ago."

                The accent was nearly physical in its force. He knew it, and she knew he knew it. She said it was good of him to send "the little one" away. He'd had a look on him she knew intimately, one that had taken years to school off her face whenever her husband was possessed by one of his savior fantasies. This woman was long a lady, and the man for years, a soldier, and yet one knew the other as if the underground was written, tattooed onto every inch of them, a language Erwin could not know.

                "My question remains, Madam."

                She clicked her tongue at him. "You're no fun." She looked him over then, eyes roving nakedly over the lines of his face and the swell of his chest through jacket and coat. They inched lower as her fingers spilled down the cords of his arms and twined into his hands.

                "I'll give you what you need," she murmured.

                "If," he said.

                "If."

 

                When she locked the inn door, she offered to play the part of a lover, past, present, imagined, it was all the same to her. She laughed when he offered to do the same and called him a fool as her fingers danced down the buttons on his shirt, as he trailed mechanical kisses along her too-slender neck. It's you I want, she said, and no one else. It's you I want, he lied, and no one else.

                _Past curfew, northwest quarter, the child told him. The merchant's guild gets the worst of it so start there, he said. The squad leader dropped a clinking pouch into little hands and posted lookouts that looked and looked and looked. He played the game of almost-there and just-missed-them for weeks before his ears chanced on the ghost of a wire's hiss, for months before his eyes at last placed a face to a long-whispered name._

                She sighed as he hovered over her, tasted all of her, kisses impassioned. Every nip, a ration unhalved, every teasing kiss, a new coat, a new horse, a new drum of morphine. Hers was fate's hand and he worshipped it, worshipped her. He entertained no illusions and knew she didn't either, knew by how freely she moaned his name and muttered obscenities that she expected nothing more from a man who may not live to see another spring.

                _"You must think I feel nothing," the squad leader said. The light of the funeral pyre played on the set of his jaw, on the tear-less planes of his face._

_The private said nothing, not then. When he came to the squad leader before another pyre, always another, he recalled the names of all the brats with feet too slow and fingers too sloppy, all the little bodies that starve or rot or warm a stranger's bed because of him, bodies he didn't save, could have, should have._

_"You must think I feel nothing," the private said._

                Her thighs trembled at his ears. Her hands pressed demands into his hair. Along her hips, he raked his own, soothing, stilling for only a moment as he came across the barest of dips, puckered skin scrawling an Underground legacy on pale skin. She noticed, always noticing, and laughed breathily as he mapped the spidery white scars, as she trailed his.

                Her back arched as he entered her. Pointed, manicured nails curled hard in his own.

                _Calloused hands roamed over the working parts, undid the jamming gears. The commander bit his tongue and swallowed too-human sounds but the hands dug, parted, rolled harder, always harder, as if to squeeze the machine-man delusion out of him, as if to argue the imagined steel out of his bones and the circuitry from his mind, as if to force the sounds from him, a language the commander insisted he couldn't speak. His teeth ached with unmade sighs._

_One night, a soft, shuddering thing slipped past his prison guard jaw and the captain never again began or ended his visits without passing between the points of his blades._

                They parted amiably. The money was his. The pleasure was hers. He returned to his own inn across town and informed the lookout he had instructed to raise an alarm had he not returned by morning to stand down. He showered and shut his eyes on the lightening sky for an hour or two of dreamless sleep.

                The captain didn't answer when he knocked so the commander descended the steps and entered the carriage alone. Not long after, the captain emerged, but something about him made Erwin hold his good morning and remain behind the opaque carriage curtains. He watched the captain descend the steps unevenly, as if one leg were shorter than the other, and recalled a barely-there story behind the clink of bone shards on metal pans, behind shouted orders and bone saw thrum - caught wire, split belly.

                Thinking himself unwatched, the captain allowed himself the limp he had disguised all week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone's in trouble ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿


	8. The Carriage

                The captain shut the door and the carriage began to move. He kept his weight off his right leg as he moved to sit opposite the commander, then folded it over his left. Sunlight slashed across his uniform as he plastered himself against the window and made it entirely clear that he would sooner become one with the carriage than start a conversation.

                Erwin allowed the carriage to pass through Wall Sina before he turned his eye again to the captain, certain now that he had no intention of acknowledging the severity of his disobedience on his own terms.

                "Le-"

                 "How'd the meeting go?"

                Erwin watched him continue obstinately facing the passing town. "Meeting?"

                "We shoulda left last night. Driver said you had some last minute meeting."

                The wheels shuddered and Erwin's stinging back was thrown flush with the seat. He set his jaw against the burn and leaned forward. "It went well," he said. "An unanticipated donor caught me as I was leaving. With their contribution, our goal has been me-"

                "Just like that, huh. Terms must've been solid."

                "They were...agreeable, yes."

                Levi huffed softly, the sound nearly lost among the sounds of merchant carts moving all around them, in the market-song of the new day.  He tapped mindlessly on his thigh and sunlight spilled and welled and spilled over the spidery scar threading over his knuckles. He'd pressed his lips to them, pretended to.

                When he looked up, he found that Levi was watching him. His eyes were sunken, as if he hadn't slept. 

                "Who was it? Some soldier's widow?"

                "Levi."

                "Nah, maybe a philanthropist, a real do-gooder-"

                "Captain. Your posturing is transparent and unnecessary.  You will tell me what possessed you to hide your injury like a first year trainee."

                "A scratch, you mean."

                "I've never known you to have such a meager tolerance for pain. Perhaps we should start you on a morphine drip to alleviate the strain of bearing this week and a half-old _scratch_."

                "If I hadn't come-"

                "I would have brought someone else."

                "And you wouldn't have gotten half your haul, not after you talked me up like a show pony-"

                "You danced with the nobles' wives and daughters _every night_ -"

                "On your orders."

                "My orders were and have always been predicated on my knowledge of your well being. I cannot risk aggravating an injury beyond repair and losing my best soldier for the sake of a penny. I cannot give orders worthy of my soldiers, worthy of you, if I am lied to. It will not happen again. Is that understood?"

                The captain worried him then. His expression was not of mortification or embarrassment or fury - all of which he understood, all of which he expected. No, his lip curled into a contemptuous bastard of a smile.

                "Yes, sir," he said, and turned away.

                The sounds of the waking town were beginning to fade. The muted countryside hum was no balm for the stiff silence that hovered in the carriage. Violets and reds bloomed across the shivering fields. The captain's leg bobbed, and not from the shuddering carriage.

 

_"Five years? And not a soul missing, not a penny?" she asked. Erwin found his trousers, having been kicked off in pretend-abandon, and began to dress._

_"He's an honest, loyal man and a brilliant soldier.  If the heavens had sent me an archangel, I would not be the wiser."_

_"How romantic."_

_"Not at all," Erwin frowned. He looked for his shirt as she lounged on the bed. He couldn't remember how they had chanced on the topic. "Unless you refer to capital-r Romance, in which case I'm afraid I can't humor you. I can either wage war or romanticize one, but not both."_

_"Oh no, commander, little-r. But you do romanticize this man."_

_Erwin paused in his search. He turned to her. "If I do, then I've failed him. I command people, not ideas."_

_She only laughed. After watching him struggle to find his shirt, she at last reached behind her and retrieved it. She held it out for him to slip his arms through._

 

                He began to think he may have been unkind. Not unjust, but certainly blind to the captain's intentions.

                "Levi. I-"

                "Don't."

                "I would hate if this grew into something that-"

                "It won't."

                "-came between us professionally. There's hardly time for-"

                "Forget it."

                "It's unlike you, the deception. If there's anything-" 

                "There's nothing," Levi snapped. "When are the horses coming?"

                He crossed his arms and hugged them to his chest as a chill rose from the shadow of the falling sun. The scar stretched over his clenched hand, white on white. Erwin decided to entertain his diversion.

                They fell into familiar territory with talk of logistics, equipment, horses - things that can be measured and understood. Things that mattered and didn't matter.

                Levi shook his head. "Three men to a horse. What are we, pigeons?"

                "I don't like it either, but there's nothing we can do. Nearly half of their pastures were within Maria. They can't part with more and sustain their herd."

                "Bullshit. They were fine a season ago. And the blades? They need steel mommies and daddies around to make steel babies?"

                "Inflation. And oddly enough, worker shortages."

                "Worker shortages? _Shortages_?" Levi was yelling now. "Well then they shoulda piped up a genocide or two ago. I know where they can find some workers. Throw em over the fucking wall," he struck the carriage wall with his fist, "and let em pick their precious workers one bone at a fucking time."

                Erwin said nothing. The blow had left a sizeable dent. At the driver's worried inquiry, Levi barked at him to mind the road.

                "We had contracts," Levi seethed.

                "Contracts can be broken."

                Levi slid down the seat to sit just opposite Erwin and lowered his voice. "I can encourage them to keep their end."

                "Extortion."

                "Incentive."

                "Too risky. We don't have a shortage-"

                "Yet. Let em push us once, just once, and they'll push again, again, again."

                "They have no reason to lie. We've been more than reasonable business partners."

                "All carrot, no stick."

                "We've never needed the stick."

                "I'd take more than a stick to their fucking heads, fucking shortages, _fuck_..."      

                "I find the claim suspect too. We're going to wait. Acting too quickly would-"

                "Wait 'til we've got three men to a blade? Wait 'til we're telling the brats they should make do with pitchforks like the fucking refugees we handfed to the titans? We can't fuck our way outta this, we're too-"

                "Can't what?"

                Levi frowned, one eye squinted as if replaying his own words as Erwin did the same, disbelieving. Levi dropped his elbows to his knees and shoved his face in his hands.

                "Shit," he said, and it he hadn't sidled closer before, Erwin may not have heard it over the clip of the horse and the whining in the wheels. Erwin tried to quiet the pounding in his ears as Levi's hands dragged at his face as if he meant to tear off his mouth.

                "I never took you for a gossip, captain," Erwin said evenly.          

                "So you deny it," Levi suggested. What little evening light that entered the carriage hit his eyes unevenly, giving them the appearance of being backlit, like a cat's, or a serpent's. His words held the venom to match.

                "This is not an issue of great priority."

                "So you deny it."

                Erwin wanted to, desperately, and it was that desperation that aborted his readied _yes_. He was not confronted with physical harm, nor political. Levi would not expose him, would not dare drag the Corps through the mud. However he knew, or supposed that he knew, surely he understood the reason. Surely the disgust in his face was born of misunderstanding.

                "I did it for-"

                "The Survey Corps? Oh, fuck me...oh, don't, actually, 'cause it looks like I can't afford you."

                "How-"

                " _How?_ She made eyes at you like you were a piece of fucking meat," Levi said as if Erwin had missed the most obvious thing in the world."Like a trophy. For hours. And if you hadn't sent me away, I could have-"

                "And repeat what happened at Lord Telkin's dinner? If calling someone Colonel Fuckass was all it took to procure funds, we'd be in much better shape-"

                "That lord-shaped tumor didn't handle the money anyway, and that underground bitch would have loved me sending him off, woulda given us the cash on the spot. Or maybe you knew that, maybe you knew all along what she wanted and thought you'd get rid of me so you could get yourself a nice bonus, yeah?" 

                Erwin bristled, but said nothing. He couldn't believe what he was hearing.

                "All clammed up now, huh? Don't you wanna talk?" he mocked. "Wanna hash things out, get to the bottom of fuck all?"  His leg bobbed still more violently.

                "I was unaware that a consensual transaction between adults is-"

                "You _fucking_ moron," Levi snarled, and now he shook visibly. "You think this is 'cause you're a whore? You think I give half a shit where you stick it or why? What if she or one of her powerful friends was out for your head? Could you have stopped her, yeah, if she pulled a knife out of her ass while riding your dick and cut you up, thrown you in a river? No, no she'd sell the pieces to her underground friends, yeah - wanna know how hot cannibalism is down there? Wanna know how much your ass is worth to-"

                "Enough, Levi. I was never in any danger-"

                "How many?"

                "How many...?"

                "How many expeditions did you fuck outta her?"

                Erwin held his glare. "One."

                Levi visibly deflated. He shoved himself back against the wall of the carriage and returned his gaze to the window.

                "One," he echoed.

                "Levi-"

                "Forget it," he said again, the sound of it at once harsh and hollow.

                But Levi spoke again not seconds later:

                "What if she wanted a brat? A scandal? A brat scandal? What if she had some fucking, some- some disease? Want m- your men watching you rot in a bed cause you couldn't keep it to yourself? You think you know those underground whores but they're all-"

                "You're being unfair. She's lived on the surface for-"

                "I don't care if she's been sitting on that moron's money for a hundred years. Once underground trash, always-"

                "Enough. Would you extend that same judgment to yourself?"

                 "You don't get it," Levi said, his head in his hands now. "You don't get-you could have...alright. You're right. Who gives a shit." 

                The creaking carriage was deafening in the following silence. Erwin grit his teeth against another sharp shudder that brought his back against the seat.  Levi's leg twitched, too, at the shudder.

                He couldn't understand it. The captain had never before intimated that he considered him incompetent or foolish or weak. Of course Erwin had checked her pockets, had chosen the inn, paid for two rooms, planned the two routes. He had dictated at what time each of them would separately depart from the mansion, when they would arrive, separately too, at the inn. He ate nothing that she or the inn offered, drank nothing, accepted no gifts and no invitations, stationed his own guards and used a false name, instructed her to invent one as well. He had wrapped his hand over her mouth and bit his own lip, had used his own contraceptive and left no marks on her skin, no single hair of his on her clothing.  

                He wondered then, if he had crossed the limit of his captain's respect. If this man could fathom Erwin Smith the murderer and the liar, the extortionist and the swindler, but not Erwin Smith the prostitute, the beggar. Perhaps it was for the best. The commander would know better than to assume loyalty could exist without footnotes.

                 When he spoke, it was a sound foreign to his own ears. It wasn't often that he voiced regrets. He'd forgotten how they weighed heavier on the tongue.

                "I should have told you."

                The captain said nothing.

                "In any case, I should have, but especially last night. I disregarded your knowledge when I should have sought it out immediately. I-"

                "Fine. I don't care. Whatever."

                The last light of the evening had faded. Erwin wanted to see his face, but it had long since disappeared into the dark. Night had stolen him.

                 Some light remained strewn on odd corners, strained and warped. Some spilled across Levis' leg as it tensed again at a light shudder of the carriage.

                "What did the medic say?" Erwin asked.

                "Mm?"

                "Your leg. Did they recommend anything aside from rest?"

                Levi didn't answer immediately. He shifted uncomfortably and muttered something.

                "Levi?"

                "Didn't see one."

                Erwin exhaled through his nose.

                "Don't coddle me. In the underground-"

                "Were there titans in the underground?"

                Levi didn't answer. Erwin crouched to reach a compartment under his seat and withdrew a gas lamp. Levi squinted as the light flickered on and bobbed with the list and sway of the carriage. Erwin hung it from an overhead hook.

                "May I?" he asked. Levi eyed him. For a moment, Erwin wondered if he had been too abrupt. Levi knew he had served in the medical division, knew the commander knew his way around an injury of the sort, and yet a flare of anxiety fluttered in his chest as immediately as the flame had born itself in the lamp above.   

                Wordlessly, Levi uncrossed his legs.

                Erwin shifted closer to Levi's end of the carriage and relaxed the fit of his boot around his knee. He chided him for wearing it too tight. Levi rolled his eyes. Erwin braced his hand against the heel,  pulled and softly twisted this way and that to shimmy the high boot from his leg. Levi grabbed it when it came free and set it beside himself. His leg hovered uncertainly between them.

                Erwin guided him to rest his heel on his thigh. His toes twitched as the commander slipped one finger, then two, then three, between his instep and the gear strap that wrapped about his foot and released it. Next came his sock, which Levi, too, folded and laid beside the boot.

                Erwin freed him from the rest of the straps and folded his pants leg to the knee. Levi did not voice a preference between folding it or simply rucking it up as it was more commonly done, but aside from an amused twitch at his mouth, he didn't object.

                Levi's breathing grew shallow as Erwin moved to his ankle. As he pushed the resisting foot out of its relaxed point, Erwin just barely heard a strained breath.

                "There," Erwin said, to himself, to Levi, it didn't matter.

                  The leg tensed as Erwin ran his hand along his calf, feather-light. A sudden welling of shame filled him from crown to feet as the pads of his fingers mapped the stiff muscle, the beautiful limb. He touched him as time would touch him. He held at once man and corpse, at once salvation and rot.

 

_"What will you do," she asked as she buttoned his shirt, "when you take Maria? When you stick it to those brutes? What does a soldier do with no war?"_

_She must have caught him in an optimistic mood because he reminded her of the infinitesimal chances of his survival only two or three times before he wondered aloud at what they might find beyond the walls. Beastly canyons. Oceans of sand. The sea._

_"-and sometimes I wonder," Erwin said, lulled by her smiles, the weight of her in his arms, the weight he imagined to be any but hers, "Would he chart the land or test the waters? Escort humanity out of its cage? Hunt for treasures and lost things in mountains? Would he sail into the horizon? Straight across? Would he-"_

_She listened, encouraged him. He knew to keep his head, to hold his tongue should her questions stray to more sensitive matters, yet they never did. He filled her ears with the silliest thoughts. There is no_ after _for himself. There is no_ after _for a murderer. But for Levi, he could imagine one. He could imagine them all._

_He had never told the captain, and he never will. The commander demanded he lead his armies and slay his enemies. He demanded he abandon his closest friends and colleagues and students to gnashing jaws. And if the need arose, to abandon even himself. He will not insult him with idle fantasies._

_His hand was on the doorknob when she said it._

_"You love him."_

_He didn't turn. To the warped old wood of the creaking door, he said:_

_"I wouldn't dare."_

 

                "That bad?" Levi asked, eyes flickering from his hands to his face.

                Erwin shook his head quickly, too quickly. His hair flirted out of his part and hovered over his eyes as he pressed harder. Levi froze bodily, and this close to him, Erwin felt the shock of it as if he shared his nerves.

                He pressed deliberately then, kneading his calf as Levi's hands clawed into his thighs and his chest rose and fell erratically. Before he knew he had done it, Erwin had pursed his lips and filled the carriage with a soft hush. He knew because when he stopped, Levi's leg stiffened again.

                Beyond the window was a gentle void. The carriage was all that remained in the world, and Levi, its last soul.

                Erwin moved to his ankle. Humanity would never know how deeply it needed this collection of wiry ligaments and ashy bone woven in just this way and no other, and savagely, he imagined how easily his monstrous hands might crush it, might bury the human race in a wayward turn of his wrist.

                He felt eyes on him and he was certain that Levi read his thoughts on his face, that he knew the demons that tugged as his fingers and boiled his blood. Erwin pressed his thumbs into his instep, rolled his foot between his hands in apology, head bowed as if in prayer.

                When he looked up, Erwin found another man. The eyes that kept vigil until every last soul had gone and every entrance had been secured had long ago fluttered shut, his head leaning against the seat and swaying with the roll of the carriage. The cocktail of bored annoyance that tugged eternally at his lips had gone, and with its absence, the lamplight curled over the unflattened bow, the sloping curve of the faint part. His hands rested limply on his thighs. His brow remained drawn, edged downward not at their meeting but at their ends, drawn not in concentration but something like abandon.  

                Erwin rubbed circles over the slope of his ankle and watched that brow twitch, watched it draw higher. He committed to memory the rattle-breath in his lungs as he strummed the viola strings between the flat of his heel and the back of his knee. He consumed him.

                Shame returned and stilled his hands. He took too much. He wanted too much.

                "Don't..."

                Erwin withdrew his hands at the harsh whisper. Levi's brow lowered where they joined now, accusatory, but his eyes remained closed.

                "...don't stop..." he said, so Erwin didn't stop.

                He readjusted the strap at the instep of Levi's other foot by the time headquarters had made itself known by the lamps lining its stone parapets. Levi tugged his boots back on as Erwin ordered the captain to keep off his leg for at least a week.

                Levi set his leg down. It listed against Erwin's as the carriage tipped on the uneven road. The commander thought nothing of it. The captain was unfocused, exhausted. When the carriage righted itself, Levi's knee remained against his.

                Erwin wondered then, as the carriage turned into a snaking road, why the captain was exhausted, why he had not slept.

                _She made eyes at you like you were a piece of fucking meat._

                He had known her intentions before the dinner had even ended, maybe before it had even started. Erwin's chest tightened as the carriage crossed the few meters remaining between them and the entrance to the compound. If Levi were anxious, he was the sort to act against the object of his fears than to wallow in them. He was an excellent tracker. A spy to shame spies. Had Erwin not stopped him, their contacts at the steel mill would regret their deception well before the sun rose again.

                His gut roiled, though the carriage had come to a stop. He knew why Levi had not slept, what he had done.

                "Last night," he said thickly. He could not look at him.

                Levi had one foot to the ground. He froze. 

                "How much?" Erwin asked.

                Levi turned, waited.

                "How much did you see?"

                A century might have passed as Levi opened his mouth to speak, or only a second. Maybe all the wall's mathematicians were wrong. Maybe a century and a second were one and the same.

                Before he stepped out of the carriage, before the night would steal him again, he said:

                "I'd sail. Straight across."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know yet if I want Levi's mother to factor into the story proper, but even if not, I did consider what happened to her to find how he'd react.


	9. The Patient

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The response to this fic has been.. I didn't expect anything like it. Thank you, everyone who left a comment or kudos.

 

Hooves crackled across stolen land. The scant ice that clung to bent grass and bony trees after a too-long winter shattered underfoot. They rode on glass.

The commander frequented the capitol far more often than headquarters while his soldiers prepared for the expedition at the first thaw. Their hands blistered from blades, his feet from dances.

Canons jostled on thrice-reinforced carts. The dull unfamiliar clangs echoed over hoof stomp cymbals, over blood rush hymns.

The captain had agreed that spinning his absence at further donor meetings and dinner parties as self evident proof of the Corps' efficiency was the most prudent course. He was needed, of course, to train the soldiers, old and new, for the as yet uncertain demands of future expeditions. In three months, the one saw the other for the breadth of an order and no longer. There was no carriage outburst. There was no overheard not-confession. There was the Survey Corps and there were the titans and there was the reclamation.

First expedition. Seven titans avoided. Three titans slain. Three soldiers slain. District one secured.

Blood not his own pooled across shower tile. Erwin rubbed crumbling mud from his hair, scraped his soldiers from beneath his nails. A week before their first expedition of the year, he informed the Corps that in order for the organization to remain in existence, the powers that be demanded no less than ten districts beyond Wall Rose be reclaimed before the end of that fiscal quarter. The moans of disbelief didn't worry him and neither did the complaining and the yelling and the crying for his soldiers did none of these things. No, his nights hummed with the deafening sound of a hundred fists meeting a hundred hearts.

Second expedition. Ten titans avoided. Two titans slain. Five soldiers slain. District two partially secured.

Visiting nobles cooed at the boxes of recovered trinkets and personal affects demanded of the Corps as part of their funding agreements. They tried on amulets, demanded mirrors. They squinted, unimpressed, at brass wedding rings taken from the hands of farmer and servant and overseer.

Third expedition. Two titans avoided. Seven titans slain. Eleven soldiers slain. District two secured. District three secured.

The captain lit the pyres. He was the first to come. He was the last to leave.

Fourth expedition. Six aberrants slain. The force was halved. District four secured.

Food had lost its flavor. His tongue was gilded with ash.

The captain caught him working through the night three times in as many weeks, each instance accompanied with threats of violence should he catch him again. His lips bled as he shouted. Wind lash had long since dried them.

Fifth expedition. The force was halved. District five secured.

The center of the long distance formation was a blooming rose of stolen limbs. The commander hid the legless, the fingerless, the armless in the center until the center became the whole.

Many soldiers had stopped eating. The sensation of closing their jaws, of mashing, of grinding, was too much. There was precious little time for counseling. Reprimands were the sole course. Reprimands were ineffective.

Sixth expedition. The force was halved. District six partially secured.

Six expeditions in five weeks. They were too slow. They were too fast. They were too wounded.

There were too few soldiers remaining who could adequately care for the horses. They knocked against their stable walls and huffed at the weight of their matting manes.

Soon there were not even enough able soldiers to continue the campaign on this schedule. Not an hour had passed since their return from their most recent outing when the commander informed his senior officers of as much and solicited suggestions before dismissing them, allowing them their much needed showers, their much expected nightmares.

As the door shut, Erwin shed his blood-laced coat and retrieved the campaign formations. He had envisioned a number of time-cutting procedures while he briefed the officers and knew the bitter hollow of a lost idea. He winced at his hand popped in three places as he gripped a pen. For weeks, it knew little but the kiss and tear and grind of metal grooves and triggers and reins. Indents and abrasions from a near eternal grip on blade handles carved ruddy raw gorges to frame the flesh of his palm and the bony joints of his fingers. He gripped the pen harder.

One flickering idea became two became a locked back and a tightrope wrist. He stretched his right hand and took the pen in his other. The reclamation didn't wait for disobedient limbs.

There was a stomp beyond the door. He stopped breathing. Automatically, his index and middle twitched at triggers no longer there.

There was another sound, but now he knew it for what it was – a knock. His shoulders slumped at the weight of the kind of delirious relief he might have felt at having just-so escaped the jaws of a ten-meter.

Then he heard yet another, but this one was unlike the others. It was another sound he knew well but one he hadn't heard for years, one he hadn't made in years. The commander unlocked a compartment on the underside of his desk and wrapped his hand around a pistol at the click of the picked lock.

The door slammed open. Erwin thought it an unconventional method of subterfuge. A man entered and Erwin replaced the firearm. It was the captain.

“Captain. It's good to see you. I nearly have it,” he started. He began to rise from his chair only to remember he hadn't been sitting. He leaned forward to disguise the awkward move. “If we divert our remaining forces to better take advantage of the building cover near the northwest limits of district three, we will arrive at- captain?”

The captain stared at him with the most concentrated look of shock that Erwin could ever recall on him.

“Captain, are you well?”

The commander straightened far slower than he intended. His spine may as well have been riveted in place. The captain watched, motionless. Erwin rounded the desk as the captain came to him and the commander nearly took him for a vision at the way he warped and streaked across the office, nearly took it all for a dream at how the room swam.

“Strange,” Erwin said to himself as he gripped the desk for support. The captain's ears flew past his chin. His eyes spilled into his jacket.

“--at t--e do y-u th--k i- is?” The captain asked. His ears were migrating back to where they belonged. No, now they were well past his forehead.

“Captain?”

“-hat. Ti-e. Do. Yo-,” Levi said through his teeth, which were somewhere near his toes, “Think-. It. Is.”

Tie. Tie – Time.

“Ah. I know what I said a few minutes ago in the briefing, but since then I've found a route that may well-”

“Minutes.” His face at last rearranged itself into something more cohesive. The commander read the exhaustion in it.

“Forgive me. It can wait until my senior officers have rested. In the morning, we can- ”

“Reveille is in ten minutes.”

The captain strode behind him and violently parted the heavy curtains. The sun was rising.

The commander recovered with a huff of laughter. “So it is.”

The captain didn't laugh.

“Good. In that case,” Erwin said, eager to say something, anything, that might defuse the look on the captain that read more and more like cold fury, “please inform the other officers to-”

“You're bleeding.”

The commander followed his eye. A hastily made dressing on his lower abdomen had soaked through.

“It's alright,” Erwin started, moving to a cabinet to retrieve a medical kit. “I'll redress it quickly enough. Meanwhile, I want you to contact the other-”

“You're gonna go. To your quarters. You're gonna take. A shower. Then you're gonna wait. For me.”

The captain did not stay to hear his answer.

The commander snuffed out the lamp he had apparently not needed for hours. His abdomen began to ache as if the renewed awareness of his injury was tied intimately with his nerves. His breathing aggravated the throbbing still more.

He went to his quarters. He took a shower. He waited for him.

Erwin gritted his teeth as water trickled over jagged barely-closed lesions on his arms and torso as the horn blow of reveille blared throughout the complex. The largest was a crooked line gorging across the V of his hip, a gift courtesy of scattering shrapnel from a shattered blade. His left from chest to thigh was scored by several tens of these same lines in every arrangement of long and short, deep and shallow. He pulled out the pieces he'd missed in his first hurried inspection, abdomen jumping as the uneven pieces scraped and opened him again.

Two raps, sharp. Low on the door, near the knob. Then another pair, louder.

Erwin slipped into his trousers and unlocked the door. It opened as an unwise movement on his part split the delicate seams that had begun to shut the lesions. From behind, he heard a muffled thud like a dropped bag before two small solid hands whirled him around and shoved a cloth against the streaming cuts.

“Hold,” Levi demanded. Erwin replaced Levi's hands with his own as the other withdrew bandages and creams from the bag.

“This is unnecessary, I was just about to-”

Levi returned with a damp cloth and swatted Erwin's hands away. He peeked behind the cloth and when he was satisfied that the bleeding had abated, began to wash the most serious wound and yank out still more pieces of that shattered blade like wasp stings on open flesh.

Levi's other hand was splayed spider-like across his abdomen, fingers darting here and there to push the skin open and shut to maneuver out the offending shards. Erwin was too aware of it falling and rising with the waves of tension in his tired muscle that accompanied each strike of the pinzette. Even in this, the captain was precise. If it came to it, he would not have done any worse with the razor ends of his blades.

“I need- oh-” Erwin started, but another twist of his nerves stayed his breath. “Allow me to have a subordinate bring my notes while we-”

“No.”

“Surely it only makes sense to-”

“No.”

Levi didn't humor any further entreaty and informed him that if he saw him anywhere but his bed for the remainder of that day he would personally lash him to it and receive the blessing of the Corps' chief medical officer in writing and copied in triplicate. Any further complaints or perceived attempts at slipping away were met with a bruising hold on his hip.

Erwin relented if only to encourage the claw-like grip to lessen, to cool the hot lance of something or other that plucked at the base of his spine at the sight of the captain on his knees, at the warmth of his breath at his hip. His mind wandered. He imagined that dark hair whipped by high winds, his skin sprayed by a playful wave and course with salt, warm with the sun's kiss. The image was one of a hundred, a thousand, he knew not how many, and they only multiplied after a carriage ride that never happened, after a not-admission that meant nothing at all.

He watched him as he worked, traced the slope of his nose and the lines on his brow as if he hadn't seen them in years, as if he was beginning to forget them. As his skin warmed at his touch, Erwin hoped, prayed, that Levi would look up now and he would tell him that he did not want men, that he did not want him, that he did not want this, or surely any variant of the like that would drown the poisonous chorus of _what if what if what if_

Without warning, Levi undid his fly and tugged his trousers down mid-thigh. Levi cleaned the wounds across his thigh, rubbed that sweet smelling ointment into the worst of them. His lip curled as the counter creaked at Erwin's white-knuckled grip.

“Don't be modest now, commander.”

Erwin watched him begin to bandage the cuts and abrasions from the bottom up. Torn nails caught in bandage mesh. Erwin reached for the sterile cloth to do the same, top down.

“What could you mean by that, captain?”

Erwin's efforts were sabotaged by the traitorous cramps in his hands.

“I don't remember using big words.”

Levi frowned as Erwin's abdomen jumped at a bout of laughter.

“You're right. It's silly.”

Erwin tried again, mindful to lock his wrists to avoid their complaints.

“What's silly?”

Their hands knocked together as their efforts met at the lesion that carved into his hip. Erwin held the bandage in place as Levi rose and wound it around him.

“Modesty. Delicacy. Desire.”

Levi said nothing.

“Luxuries,” Erwin said, a rough whisper. He watched dark strands flutter at his words, so close was Levi standing. “Like soft sheets and red meat.”

Levi finished dressing him and slowly shimmied his trousers over his thighs so as to not disturb the bandages. Heeding his own words, Erwin only watched as Levi's hands traced the swell of his ass, surely clinical, as he tugged his pants back into place. He only watched as Levi's body caged him against the counter, as his hands hovered at his hips, thumbs skirting his sides, truly clinical. Erwin closed the trousers, the clink of zipper teeth a little roar in his ears.

He watched as Levi's knees knocked against his own as he drew closer, as he cocked his head and traced the dressing Erwin had made across his middle, clearly clinical, as a strand or two of blueblack slipped through the whorl of curling ivory-laced sand on his chest. He clicked his tongue and chided Erwin for his sloppiness and Erwin pretended to believe him. He ripped away the perfectly adequate dressing and started over, skirting and winding, perfectly clinical.


	10. The Jackdaw

 

True to his word, the captain had alerted the Corps' chief medical officer. The commander stomached a distant annoyance at having to report his meal intake and sleeping hours to the chief only because the walk to the medical offices afforded him the time to think of how best to disguise his habits from his officers in the future.

The next day, the commander gathered his senior staff and tightened their projected completion estimate as far as he was able. Unbeknownst to the others, he had weeks prior assigned an officer to insert herself into a Sina records office and unearth any property records which might give them a more thorough understanding of the area. Another pair of officers had been sent to report a number of unimportant incidents to Military Police headquarters as a cover for still more officers to search for any relevant criminal records from the area from before the fall of Maria after the captain had suggested that a petty criminal would know the streets and tunnels better than the most decorated officer.

The dismal number of remaining able soldiers meant that the commander had little choice but to call these and all his other active and sleeper agents back to headquarters to coordinate for one final push. Though he pulled them out far before he intended to and at the risk of losing access to data they may have acquired had they remained only another day or another week, the aggregate result of his probes afforded them much needed strategic alternatives, but more importantly, it restored the confidence of the senior officers.

The commander watched them train the remaining soldiers with a renewed vigor he had earnestly feared he would never see again.

Two raps, sharp. Low on the door, near the knob.

“Sometime this year, commander.”

Erwin withdrew from the window in his quarters. As he turned to leave for a meeting with investors to assure them that the campaign was on schedule, he thought the light fell oddly on the captain's face. As he moved aside for the commander to pass, he knew it to have been not the light but a peculiar expression, barely-there. He shoved the errant thought aside.

He would not see it again until after the fall of Trost.

A courier delivered the news in the throes of an otherwise successful reclamation of the ninth district. The expedition was turned around. The campaign was abandoned. The canons that had consumed blood and limb and soul to deliver and position and prepare were never once used.

Time was war's servant. War bloated time. War squeezed time. The time in which a soldier prayed that his wires held fast to wood or brick or stone aged him a year. A month-long leave passed in the space between _welcome_ and _back_.

War split time. There was a time when there were humans and there were titans. Then there was a time when the two weren't mutually exclusive.

Two raps, sharp. Low on the-

“Come.”

The captain marched into his quarters with a more murderous stride than usual and shut the door behind him. The commander recalled the day's reports.

“I understand there was an incident with a spoon.”

Levi gave him a look.

Erwin let it go. “You leave in the morning, correct?” The captain had arrived only that afternoon to inform the commander of their progress with the hard-won titan shifter.

“Yeah.” Levi crossed the room and set a bottle on the desk. “Can't leave the brats alone for long-”

Erwin came to the desk and turned it over. “This is-”

“Saw it in your office at Maria HQ before it went under. Dunno if it's the same, just remembered the gist of the label and-”

“It is.”

East Utopian whiskey. He hadn't seen a bottle in years. The one he'd had within Maria had been a gift from a fellow soldier to celebrate his reaching the rank of captain. He couldn't remember the man's face.

Erwin ran his fingers down the sides. He thanked the captain and hoped the disbelief in his thoughts hadn't snuck into his words. Five years.

Levi draped his coat across the back of a chair. “Open it.”

Erwin raised a brow. “Do we have something to celebrate after all?”

Levi took a seat. “We did. Just didn't have the time.”

He didn't offer any more. Erwin's brow knitted in thought. The last several weeks had been busier than his last several years. The fall of Trost. The reclamation of Trost. A titan shifter. A trial. A basement. A purpose.

Erwin looked to Levi and saw it again, that quirk in his brow, the odd purse at his lips. A face from a lifetime ago.

“The districts,” Erwin said.

Levi stood and grabbed a pair of glasses from a cabinet.

“But we never-”

Seeing that Erwin wasn't making the move to pour, he did it himself. “We would have.”

“Wars aren't won on would haves.”

Levi slid Erwin's shot across the desk and raised his own.

“Don't piss on their memory with poster slogans.” Levi threw his head back and frowned at the sting.

They had been making good time. If Trost had not been compromised, the campaign would have succeeded. They would have had their funding. All the arms and legs and souls scattered beyond Rose would not have been lost in vain.

Yet come next financial quarter, Erwin strongly suspected that they may have been forced to undertake the most demanding series of expeditions in Survey Corps history once more. With the clarity of hindsight, Erwin knew now that the nobility had lost patience with the Survey Corps. They were never meant to succeed. They had narrowly escaped a deliberate cull.

His eyes fell on the potted carnation on his desk. The quartermaster had taken it upon herself to “liven up” some of the officer's quarters, and Erwin had not been spared. The reds and yellows coiled like mottled bruises.

They drank to the Survey Corps.

Erwin let the drink's aftertaste simmer on his tongue. Time had rendered it unfamiliar. He felt Levi's eyes on him and took comfort in the certainty that time would not be able to rot the memory of him from Erwin's mind. When Erwin passed from this world by the grace of a bullet or a sword or a set of meter-length jaws, he only hoped the captain would not waste his grief for long.

Lamplight played on the bottle. Amber lapped at glass shores.

“Strange,” Erwin muttered.

“Mm?”

Erwin watched him. “I'm sure you've heard. A mysterious benefactor, some… eccentric noble, I'm told, offered the Corps an incredible deal from his textile mill. Then from his butcher. It would have been a shame to pass them by. The quartermaster distributed them today. Cotton sheets. Fresh lamb.”

“Heard the brawls in the dining hall from the main road.”

“I'm sure.”

Levi was silent. He expected Erwin to go on, and when he didn't, he only shrugged. He traced the rim of his glass with an idle finger.

“Nothing wrong with something like that. Once in a while.”

Erwin opened his mouth to speak.

Levi interrupted. “Alright, cough up the ending. It's been eating at my ass for weeks.”

Erwin held his eye as Levi curled up in the chair. He ignored the tightness in his chest at the reminder of how small he was, how much smaller he could make himself to be with only the bend of a knee, with tucked elbows and curled toes. He was so much smaller than the idea of him, of Erwin's idea of him, and Erwin forgot what he'd meant to ask.

“I'm sure it can wait until-” Erwin teased.

“If I don't hear it and you die tomorrow I'll stitch you together myself and then kill you again.”

“But you still wouldn't have heard it.”

“Let me finish. I'd put you together a second time, kill you again, bring you back a third time, then you'll tell me. Didn't you say that's how it works in stories, rule of three?”

Erwin's jaw worked as he struggled to smother a laugh. Levi crossed his arms.

“That sounds like a lot of work. I'll save you the time.”

The night before Levi had gone with his squad to supervise Eren's training, Erwin recalled a story he heard often as a child, about a boy cursed by a witch to hear the vile and foolish thoughts of every man, woman and child in his village. Frightful of his power and fearing that he might succumb to madness, the boy was imprisoned underground. Years later, the villagers unearthed him and found a man gentle and wise and just. A man who then guided the villagers through the horrors of plague and famine and beast.

Erwin had passed back up the underground stairway after informing the shifter of their intention to allow him to join the Survey Corps.

Lamplight flickered across the stone tiles, his father had said. Moisture collected in the cracks and tufts of green and brown carpeted the walls, slick to the touch, his father had said. Decades later, Erwin passed by cracked walls, passed by a cursed boy, and remembered.

The captain had noticed his pensiveness. Only after the trial did Erwin bow to his teasing insistence and resurrect his father's artful pauses and the cadence of his denouements until the sun rose to listen, until his voice scorched his throat, until the captain's slack-jawed hunger was tattooed in his mind.

Levi poured them another. The amber played in his eyes. Overcast grey warmed, sunlit.

“So. What happened to it?”

Erwin pulled up a chair and rapped on the wood of the desk.

“The jackdaw-”

“Describe it again. It's been a while.”

“It's a Karanese bird,” Erwin said. The light flickered across Levi's recollective squint. “Black plumage. Grey at the nape, grey eyes. And some are-”

A breeze snaked through the room and curled through their hair. As Levi carded his away from his eyes, Erwin caught a strand or two of grey. Levi shot up to shut the window.

“Some are streaked with silver,” Erwin said.

“He flew through mountains, over oceans of sand and murky seas. The earth waved to him as he passed – she loved to watch him go. He flew so far underground he could not see. He flew so high that his feathers curled and his lungs burned at the shallow air,” he said, at which Levi's hand rose to his throat, limp and unfocused, as if it moved of it own will.

“He flew for all his life until he came across a wild gale, and at any other moment he could have turned his wings and glided atop it, any moment but this. He was distracted, so enamored with what he would do when he found what he was looking for that he shifted his wings too sharply. He glided left for so many meters,” he said as Levi slowly canted bodily to the right as if it would right the bird too. “Until he plunged into the sea. It was a perfect sea, still as glass – the only waves for miles were the ones the little jackdaw made himself. On any other day, he would have swam to shore or to a patch of floating seaweed, dried himself off and flown away.”

“On any other...” Erwin said, and surely he had used the deliberate pause before but it was this one that maddened his listener, this one that sank canines into velvet lips and scored crescent marks into pale palms and Erwin almost wanted to drown the rest of the story, to bury it in water and create another to cut the thousand lines of tension he'd smothered him with, to sever the wires and drink the cool relief that could, should, part the wire-thin seam of his mouth. Almost.

“...but this one. So exhausted was he from his search that he gave himself to the sea.”

Levi was motionless. One by one, the lines grew slack. His lip popped out of his teeth. His arms uncrossed. Something made him conscious of the position he had unwittingly curled himself into and he straightened, again a soldier. The night was over.

Erwin's head thrummed pleasantly. He moved to set the bottle away and wished the captain a good night.

A hand shot out and took it from him. Levi led him back to his chair by his wrist and shoved lightly, though even lightly was too rough with Erwin in this state. He watched the captain pour him another and declined. Levi wouldn't hear it.

“This is how it should've ended. I'm no wordsmith but-”

“Hm. Word Smith.”

“Shut up,” Levi said, lip curling. “I'm not- whatever. Fine, the bird kicks the bucket. But how long's he been looking?”

“Years.”

“Years. What's the earth been doing? Just waving? She's getting a kick out of him, right? Watching him.” He paced. “He's not flying in a straight line. He's got mountains and forests to get through so…so what if she, I don't know, thought he'd been dancing?”

“Dancing,” Erwin echoed reverently. “In the air.”

“Yeah. Or something,” Levi said, watching him closely. “So she- she starts dancing, she finds a partner but she's too small, she can only dance around her.” Levi holds one arm before him and turns his palm up as if holding something, and wound a fist about it with the other. “Her face is fulla holes and-”

“The moon.”

“Don't interrupt. But yeah,” he said. “She finds the moon. But it's not enough, she's too big to prance around her so she's looking for...”

“Another partner.”

“Yeah. So she keeps looking – and takes a break once in a while, not like your shitty bird-”

Erwin laughed. His chest burned. Levi's voice rose and fell and rushed and slurred in perfect time.

“And she finds him. He's got a few other partners already but she doesn't care, not like she's marrying him or whatever. She starts bowing and leaning back so her head's always a lil' hotter or colder than her toes, but she's into it.” Levi made the same motion but now he strode around him, and when Erwin turned until he could turn no more, he tipped his head over the back of the chair and followed him still, feet over head.

“She finds-”

“The sun,” they both said.

Erwin laughed again, the sound unraveling from him as if he had tied it back too tight for too long.

“Amazing. Incredible. An etiological myth.”

“Better than yours,” Levi teased. He leaned both hands on the chair's back and peered down at him, and Erwin would live the rest of his life with the earth above the sky if he could rest his eyes on that emboldened blush again.

“Much better.”

Then Erwin recalled something that stunned him.

“You remembered Herodotus.”

“Yeah. And the other guy, Pythuh…pythago...”

“Pythagoras. You remembered. The reason for the seasons, the-the shape of the world…” Erwin was in awe. He had filled their scraps of time between meetings and duties with the names of forbidden things and forgotten men but his chest burned to know he'd not only remembered but understood. A colder thought struck him. “You didn't- did anyone else-”

“I'm not an idiot. You told me what got your old man…no, I didn't. No one else knows.”

“Of course, of course. Of course,” Erwin said, and his smile returned like a foreign thing – it was never so quick, so bold, had never pained him so with its intensity. Levi's hair caught in his eyelashes where it fell, a curtain to hide them from all the world. Levi's breath ghosted over his eyes as if to close them so close them he did. He sighed at the feather-stroke of nails at his nape.

“When...when all this is over-” Erwin opened his eyes. The words were a mistake. There was no after. Not for him. Not for them. Levi looked on expectantly. Erwin righted himself and drew away. Levi stepped back, brows drawn.

“Forgive me, it's late. You've got an early start tomorrow and-”

“What are you doing?”

Erwin shifted his seat to the desk proper and retrieved a number of documents he had been revising before the captain's visit. “You may go. I'm going to take care of some last-”

“Up.” Levi forcibly shoved him to his feet, at which point Erwin looked down and found them floating past his knees. The other disappeared for a moment before he thrust a glass of water into his hands and demanded he drink.

Erwin tipped his head back. Belatedly, he felt a drop skirting down his lips and curling over the slope of his jaw. Levi watched him lick his lips and brush it away before it slithered past his collar.

Levi took the glass from him and shoved him onto his bed. When the room righted itself, Erwin propped himself up and caught sight of the documents in Levi's hands.

“What are you doing?”

Levi waved them. “Can't have you getting up the second I leave.”

Erwin shook his head. It listed too far in either direction and the room spun so violently that he lay down and shut his eyes to steady it.

“Sensitive papers. Can't leave the room.”

“Bullshit. They're probably chore duties.”

“Read them.”

“Read this chicken scratch? You overestimate me.”

Erwin sat up. “Never,” he said severely, and Levi's teasing sneer fell. Before the room grew any tighter, Erwin shrugged and lay back down. “Nothing for it. You'll have to stay until I fall asleep.”

It was a mindless suggestion. Erwin's face burned at the blurted imposition. Surely the captain had more than his share of Erwin's presence for the next several weeks. He opened his mouth to apologize, to take it back.

“I'll have to stay.”

“Captain-”

He watched as he plucked a book from a far bookcase and settled himself into a chair. Not looking up from the book, he said:

“Normally the first step is to shut your eyes, commander.”

“How cruel.”

Levi sneered.

“And distant. 'Commander',” he echoed. Levi pointedly ignored him.

Erwin turned and tried to take the captain's advice. He measured time by the turning of pages.

“You were always commander.”

Erwin turned his head.

“When you were a captain, you were commander. When you were a grunt, you were commander. Shit, when you wore short pants and skinned your knees, you were probably commander. Tch,” Levi rubbed a temple. “T's too late to be saying stupid shit.”

Erwin grinned. “Here I imagined no amount of alcohol could compromise humanity's strongest.”

“'Fraid not. Guess I'm not that archangel.”

Erwin's tongue wasn't yet satisfied with running ahead of his higher reasoning.

“I wouldn't be so sure.”

Levi parted his mouth to speak and closed it again. It was unlike him to be reserved. He must have only yawned.

“You're exhausted, captain.”

“Who's distant now?”

“Levi,” Erwin said defiantly. The name burned his tongue. It sundered his throat. “Lee-vi. Lee…”

He inhaled sharply. The room was dark, his lids heavy. He must have nodded off.

He turned and found the book sprawled open on the floor, the hand that abandoned it drooping as its owner dozed, the rest of his limbs drawn together and caged between the armrests of the chair.

“Levi.”

He started awake. Erwin knew him for the lightest sleeper he'd ever known. Levi moved an awkwardly positioned arm and their ears were treated to a pair of reverberating pops.

Erwin shifted to make room.

“No,” Levi said, voice crackling from sleep.

“Don't be modest now, captain.”

Levi gave him such a look that Erwin feared he might remain in the chair's wooden confines out of spite. Finally, but not a moment before what Erwin supposed was sufficient time to quiet his own contrariness, Levi stood and entertained them with another round of pops from his formerly pretzeled limbs. It was sufficiently warm to forgo lifting the covers for either, so he only took an offered pillow and propped it against the headboard when he sat beside him, shifting until he had somehow propped himself into a position even more circuitous than the one he had in the chair. Erwin peered at him through eyelash mesh.

Levi met his eye. “What's with the look?”

“Mm?”

“You always smile like an idiot when you're smashed?”

“Where?”

Levi snorted and pointed to his mouth. His seated position blocked the dimmed lamp. Levi glowed. “There.”

Erwin looked at far down as he could. His hair fell over his eyes. “Can't see.”

A finger pressed at the corner of his upturned mouth. “Right th-”

Erwin caught his hand.

“Got you.”

He turned Levi's hand in his. A sliver of light fell on that spidery scar across his knuckles. He brushed his thumb over the raised white thread and wondered if he'd counted every inch of it on his body, every meter of that spindly silver, counted until he realized he hadn't enough to stitch Erwin together, until he realized he would need to ask for that ending after all.

Levi swallowed. “Got me.”

It was messier up close. Shallow strings criss-crossed, older and newer, but the dominant thread carved over the knuckles and the flesh of his palm. He didn't want to ask how he'd gotten it. He wanted to imagine forever, imagine the blade-hand now a foe, then a friend, now alive, then dead, imagine the reason noble, then realistic, now sadistic, then none at all. He wanted to imagine every kind of man Levi had been, every kind of him that will be, that could be, to imagine how war would split him like war split time, to imagine it cruel, to imagine it generous.

For a moment, lamplight played on the scar on Erwin's palm too, on the hand that curled over Levi's. For a moment, the two threads might have joined.

In the next, they broke apart. Levi drew away.

His eyes followed Levi's to the traitorous shirt that rucked up over the warzone of scarring on his left. He moved to pull it down. Levi stopped him.

“How is it?” Levi asked. Erwin watched his hand hover over him, uncertain.

“Healing,” Erwin said simply.

His hearth chest ignited with the first cautious pass of fingertips over fields of red and green and violet, over popped capillary rivers and split-stone scabs. He buried his face in his arm and willed away a flare of humiliation.

He buried himself still further as Levi's palm touched down and passed over the largest of the grooves and Erwin felt anew every hideous puckered welt, every warped canyon groove pierced and pulled by stitch wire.

“I'm hurting you.”

Erwin shook his head.

“I'm upsetting you.”

Erwin shook his head.

“Don't lie to me.”

Erwin opened his eyes. Levi had shifted down to his elbows and hovered over him. His knees knocked against Erwin's thighs and his eyes split him open to the bone. He brushed Levi's hands aside and pulled his shirt over his mangled skin.

“Are you ashamed?”

Erwin said nothing.

“Are you ashamed you weren't smart enough? Fast enough? Is that why you dressed it like your ass was on fire, why you refused to sleep? Were you punishing yourself? If I turn this room upside down am I gonna find a whip?”

Erwin said nothing.

“Did you think if you let yourself rot a little you'd know what it's like to die? What it's like to die for nothing?”

The words sliced into him.

Erwin exhaled sharply. “You don't believe-"

“Why should I, if you don't? You think you just need to say the right words in the right order. You think the soldiers you teach to predict the movements of four fifteen-meters in succession can't see how you carry yourself when you think no one's looking. You don't give a shit about humanity if you don't give a shit about yourself.”

Erwin said nothing. He couldn't. Levi rose and threw his feet over the side.

“So give a shit about yourself.”

He moved to stand. Erwin's arm shot out as if by own will. Erwin's tongue moved as if of it's own will. _I will I will I will._

Levi sat down as Erwin sat up, as Erwin framed his face with his burning palms and promised, as Levi curled his hands over Erwin's wrists and forgave.

Levi looked away then, burning, scalding, in Erwin's hands. He waited, though Erwin gave no such order. He waited, though Erwin wanted to give such order.

“Capt- Levi-” Erwin started and the grey returned to sunder him, to tear him apart and piece him back together and his hands shook and Levi raised his own again to anchor his wrists, to tighten the sails.

Erwin closed the distance between them. Levi's blood thundered beneath his hands and again he thought how easy it was to break and to squeeze, how easy it was to throttle the sun. Levi looked up and split the seam of his mouth, anticipating something Erwin couldn't, wouldn't, name as he guided his face down instead and pressed his lips to his hair.

He withdrew and opened his eyes to a terrible sight.

“I'm so sorry.” Erwin drew away, looked away, damned that drink with every drop of his soul. “I was too forward-”

“Tch.” Levi sidled closer, his face wiped of all but Erwin's memory of that beautifully terrible expression. “Couldn't even tell what you did, old man.”

When Erwin did nothing, frozen in place at the unreality of whether he'd possibly imagined it, Levi took his uncertain hands and brought them back to his face, to the column of his throat. “You'll have to… I don't know. Try again.”

“Strange,” Erwin said severely. He tried to recall that face, could have sworn he'd seen it, ran it like a torn reel through his mind even as he pressed his lips to his crown once, twice, before he suggested he may have nerve damage and nearly dragged him off the bed not once to rush him to a medic.

But Levi refused and trapped him between his thighs and urged him to try again, again, promised that he almost felt it when Erwin kissed one eye and then the other, when he mouthed at the slope of his cheek and the cut of his jaw, tracing, racing, memorizing to a hymn of _keep trying_ , to _almost_ _there,_ to a dance of small, insistent hands sliding over the curve of his back and the length of his thighs and when Erwin feared Levi would no longer heed his unsaid order, feared that he would grow tired of letting Erwin lead, he let his eyes drift. He let the night steal him away.

Erwin's head lay on his lap when he opened his eyes. A hand rested idly on his chest. Erwin's lashes flickered against course trousers.

Lungs swelled behind him, deepened, slowed, by sleep. He followed the raised veins in the hand on his chest, its thumb resting in the hollow of his throat. It rose and fell with every shudder of his heart. That face came to him again, the eyes a shade between hope and restlessness, between anger and daring. He could have never imagined such a terrible thing. He should have never roused in him that aching, terrible thing.

 

 

The commander walked the captain to his horse.

As he took the reins, the captain hushed his eager mare and nodded to a small bird chattering to itself on a fence post.

“Looks like a jack, yeah?”

The commander glanced at the bird, bemused. Then his face lit in recognition.

“Ah – yes, I suppose. Forgive me, captain, I don't remember very much of the other night. I hope I gave you that ending.”

The mare snorted and crushed morning dew pearls underfoot.

“Yeah,” the captain said, unseeing, and snapped the reins.

The commander returned to his quarters and aired the striped carnation he had discreetly emptied his whiskey into the night before.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [if u wanna h8 me a lil more scroll to the end](http://symbolism.wikia.com/wiki/Carnation)


	11. The End

 

He didn't remember losing his arm. He hadn't misplaced it. It hadn't had quite enough of him and popped off to go on its merry way. He didn't remember losing his arm. He remembered throwing it away.

In his training days, Erwin infuriated his superiors and peers alike. Having grown bored of weeks of tedious 3DMG formation drills, he and Mike had organized a race between themselves and the most cocksure upperclassmen they could rile into a friendly contest or two or three. It began as an excuse for Erwin to experiment with more daring routes, and for Mike to return the favor for a surprise that had involved alcohol, a bed, and three or four furious chickens. Erwin was far more engrossed with his track designs than with any desire to win, until midway through a race when a too-sharp turn forced him to swing his blade carriers in opposite directions to mitigate his momentum.

His sweating palms slipped on the burnished metal of the carriers as he recovered them from the forest floor. The move had worked, had allowed him to come in second only to Mike. Attempts to integrate the move into his formations were met with tripled stable duty and mild hearing loss courtesy of the depths of his superiors' disdain for his recklessness, and though he mopped the soiled floors as he was ordered to and even as he asked Nile to repeat himself three or four hundred times a day after his increasingly clandestine attempts to use the maneuver were each eventually discovered, he knew it to be anything but reckless, anything but mindless.

War is not destruction. War is not the opposite of peace. War is hunger. War hungers. War mashes the gristle of the gentle soul. It grinds the bones of kind words and tender thoughts.

War hungers, so Erwin abandoned his carriers and flew faster. War hungers, so Erwin abandoned his arm and rode harder.

Levi didn't knock anymore. Either he opened the door or picked a locked one. He slapped the dressing from Erwin's hand and took it in his own. He untangled the hopeless straps from his waist, clipped each belt at sunrise, unclipped them past sunset, a chorus of clicks to start the day, an encore to finish it. He did not linger. He did not stay.

 

If the commander had latched his foot into the stirrup a moment later, he'd have vaulted off his horse. Hange proposed an artificial limb to counter the weight imbalance, but they hadn't the time to build even a rudimentary one, not now. Not now that they were this close. Not now that gentle breakfast murmurings between father and son had hardened into the bones of treason.

The captain removed his hand, the one that had shot to the commander's lateral strap to steady him. A robin chased a sleepy lark across the courtyard.

“All those nights-” the commander started.

He didn't know why he'd said it. The prospect of not knowing when – if – they will next meet had loosened his tongue. The captain looked up between his second and third round of rummaging through his things to make sure the commander had all he needed for his trip to the capitol. The commander waved a dismissive hand before recalling that he no longer had the privilege of its service. He shook his head instead, thinking petulantly that if he discovered that it, too, was missing in action then he'd abandon the belated gesture altogether.

But the captain had heard the words. He'd foreseen gravity's snide lesson, had seen the muscles shift in his shoulder beneath gauze and shirt and gear and jacket and cloak. His cataloging of the commander's inventory was not a touch less calculated, not a hair less precise. Yet by the way he spoke, he knew with an otherworldly certainty what he had meant.

“Pointless,” the captain finished for him.

The commander opened his mouth, the _No_ so heavy on his tongue that it sank behind his teeth, that it slipped down his throat and poured into his palm and moved his palm to finish what his lips had started. The captain's mouth parted as the commander troubled the fine hairs on his jaw, on his cheek. Black strands fluttered against his thumb.

“Don't,” Levi said.

So Erwin didn't.

The word billowed against the open bracket of his palm. He let it batter the unfurling sail, let it fold and fall to join every unsaid  _thank you_ and every _forgive me_ and every unfinished _If I am to be_ _hanged,_ _I want you to know-_ and every _If I am forced to forget, I want you to know-._

He should have practiced his greetings instead. Still, there were only so many ways to say _Hello again. Let's do something about this shambling cathedral-sized former shadow sovereign of all humanity and then catch up._

Catch up, they did. The captain locked up the serum and went on to address the Corps, to brief them on their most vital, and possibly their last expedition. The commander continued to host logistical conferences with the other military branches well into the week.

The night before they were to depart, less than a full day between them and their crucible basement, the commander retired to his quarters. The moon watched him as he packed, as she danced round him, round the bowing earth.

“I checked.”

The commander turned at the voice. It poured into the stillness like something he could see, like something he could touch. The captain let himself in.

“You have everything,” Levi said. “Go to bed.”

The commander placed a thick book on one drawstring and pulled on the other to close his bag of everythings. He heard a huff behind him. The captain crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame, the dark shirt and slacks raised at his abdomen and at his thigh where cotton and gauze blushed, thin fibers thick with him.

“I know you do that with your teeth, old man.”

Erwin laughed softly. He was right. Erwin couldn't say why he put on this show, why he pretended. Why he thought he needed to pretend.

“You didn't eat.”

There. That's why he came. Erwin breathed out relief, but from what, he couldn't say, wouldn't think.

“I ate alone, captain. Please,” he said too-quickly, “It's late-”

“I ate alone too.”

Erwin looked at him, but his face was no more telling than his words. Their schedules had been wildly incompatible. Surely he thought nothing of it. There was no chance that of all things, he'd miss this of their separation, miss the rationed gruel they ate together, fork-clicks and hard swallows the thrilling banter between them.

“It's unlike you to be roundabout, captain.”

“Didn't mean anything but what I said, _commander_.”

A flare of something or other ignited at the base of his skull, the weight of silence a crushing, grinding thing.

“If there's nothing else, captain-”

“No, commander. Nothing.”

He turned to leave.Low titan howl rose from beyond the wall. The moon slipped behind a cloud, for no wall separated them from her.

“Wait.”

It was only when the captain turned and stared expectantly that the commander realized he had spoken aloud. He bade the captain inside and took his seat at his desk to gather his thoughts. The captain perched atop it.

Erwin looked away. “Are the troops ready?”

“Yes.”

“The horses, we need to make certain we take only the most rested-”

“Done.”

“Has Garrison lieutenant Johnston signed the artillery request for-”

“Yesterday.”

He rattled off more of these questions with answers he'd been assured of many times before, many from the captain himself and still he asked and still the captain answered with a supernatural patience, this new quality of his as unnervingly uncharacteristic as the commander's own circuitous effort to keep him there just a moment longer, just until he gathered the nerve to know what he needed it for in the first place.

But he reached the very bottom of his well of prepared remarks and last-minute checks and the stillness returned with not even a titan howl to trouble it - the one time in his life that Erwin might have welcomed that sound. Still, the captain did not offer a single admonishment, not a single knowing bite. He leaned on one hand as the other curled loosely on the desk.

Erwin became intimately aware of every inch of his own hand, of the warmth of it on his own thigh, of the terrible fingertip to shoulder strain not to raise it but to keep it still. The captain watched him lazily, unassuming, unhurried. One leg shifted beneath him, the other swayed lightly where it hung from the desk.

Moonlight flickered again on the walls of the dimmed room and for a moment, Erwin was there again, waiting biding waiting against rotting dungeon walls, against exposed brick slick with the memory of kicks and blows and cattle prods. His hand jumped, flesh stinging with the memory-weight of a too-tight manacle grinding rust and blackened blood into always open sores. One cord cut and then the next. His hand shot up, jerked like a wild thing, like a thing once caged and bound and struck and released only to flutter stupidly into another open snare, into another wild thing once caged and bound and struck and released only to open its palm and dig weeping moons into pale knuckles.

Levi turned their locked hands and shifted his sleeve away from his wrist. Erwin realized then, as he looked from the mass of reds and greens and purples swimming beneath the battered skin of his hand to the captain's iron-set jaw that he had not yet seen it unbandaged. Levi traced the green flush at his thumb with his own.

“You never answered me. Their names.”

“Levi...”

“What are their names?”

“They had orders.”

“I don't care.”

“Whatever you plan on doing, I don't condone it.”

“Not asking you to.”

“And if I ordered you to do nothing?”

“I would do nothing.”

Levi shifted closer. In Erwin's ear, Levi said, “ _I_ would do nothing.”

Erwin felt a tug at his mouth. “You're impossible.”

“I hope so.”

A quiet settled again, but a breathable one. It did not strangle them, did not throttle.

“I only wish-” Erwin started. Levi waited, but when Erwin made it clear he had no intention of finishing the aborted thought, he spoke instead.

“Those brats know, you know.”

“What do they know?”

“All that shit we-” Levi stopped to think, and when he began again, his voice was soft, so soft that if Erwin would learn later that it was not Levi's at all, he would not doubt it for long.

“Everything you showed me. Your old man's encrypted books and all, all the- the old maps, you know. The sea.”

“That's wonderful,” Erwin said, and meant it. “Now that the threat of censure and punishment is gone, these pockets of knowledge will make themselves known, will give everyone hope. Imagine how quickly they'll rebuild-”

“We.”

Erwin looked on, confused.

“We'll rebuild,” Levi clarified.

Erwin said nothing. Levi's hand left his and Erwin hoped, prayed, that he would be as quick to let go in other ways, in every other way. Some nights, he imagined it more than he imagined humanity's victory, imagined the captain's resigned glance at his broken, prostrate body, imagined him looking away, imagined that he'd ride on, that he'd forget.

Now the silence closed its hands around their throats. A kindling lit beneath their skin.

Levi stood and made for the door. They had troubled the thorns of this argument one too many times. The captain was making good on his promise to not prick his fingers again.

“I only-” Erwin started again, and this time he would finish, he must finish, if he must say anything in the world then for some inexplicable reason or for no reason at all it must be this, “-I only wish I could have returned the favor.”

When Levi's brows drew together, Erwin clutched his right shoulder and added sheepishly:

“You never listed, but even so-”

“That? You regret _that_?”

Like a cracking whip, he bound back. He gripped Erwin's hand, nails biting through skin and sleeve.

“You don't regret shit. See this?” He shook his arm like his voice shook. “See it? It's an arm.”

Erwin rose. “Levi-”

Levi let him go and threw off his own jacket. “You wanna return the favor? What are you waiting for? For the other arm to go too?” His hands went for his shirt. The buttons bounced off the desk. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

Erwin stilled Levi's hands with his own. He wanted to explain, wanted to move his leadened tongue and say even one of those unsaid things but he couldn't, wouldn't, not then and never now. Duty this and humanity that spilled rotten from his mouth, words he enjoyed saying as much as Levi, all drawn brows and shaking head and white coal hands trembling beneath his own, looked like he enjoyed hearing.

But Erwin could hold humanity's strongest for only so long, could only bear the audible grit of his teeth for so long and so in one breath, he said:

“I don't regret it, you're right, I can't. I have no right. I'm a liar and a fool. If you'll let me- if you'll-” and he expected a shove and a snide word, expected a laugh in his face and a slamming door and how he wanted these things, how he wanted them desperately instead of the naked silence and the tug on his sleeve and the moving picture of Levi swallowed by white sheets.

The bed dipped when he joined him and Erwin panicked, imagined for a moment that he might break it, might fall straight through into his next life between the iron bars of its creaking frame until a sharp grey eye peeked out of the cradle of Levi's arms, until his back shifted and his hair slithered across the ratty pillow like seaweed bobbing in the hurried scratchings of forbidden drawings.

His right shoulder strained of its own volition to join the path his left arm began and how he violently regretted every last breath of his own posturing, how he wished and swore and fed that wretched lump of could-haves and should-haves in his throat.

“Harder.”

His skin shone with oil of a modest bottle the captain kept on his person to shine his gear that instead spilled over the tight swell of his gymnast shoulders and into the pronounced valley of his spine. Maybe he was an archangel after all. If what the old books said were true, if mortals who gazed at divinity were blinded for their impudence and if the stinging in Erwin's eyes foretold that wretched end then take it he would if it meant this, only this, was the last thing his eyes would see.

“Harder.”

Levi unwound the bandage off his abdomen and held the gauze in place by the weight of his body against the bed. Once freed, he dragged Erwin's hand down, down to curl over the neglected swell of his hips, down to fall into the gentle divots framing the base of his bowing spine. Erwin watched him like a wasted detail meant a hundred thousand lashes. The cords in Levi's arm tightened not when he moved but when he stayed, when Erwin's fingertips slipped just so beneath the hem of his trousers, an accidental thing, a surely clinical thing.

“Harder.”

The bed dipped further as Erwin straddled his narrow hips and drove hard into slick coiled heat, into skin like sheet metal, into muscle like bedrock. His eyes had long since shut and his mouth shoved resolutely into his arm, a stone wall to trap every little sound, every hitching breath.

Erwin stilled his cramping arm. As he waited for the pangs to lessen, he swept his open palm up the curve of his spine, trailed back down with the feather-touch of roughened knuckles.

“Har-” A moan stole the growled demand.

Erwin had never known a body to become so still except in the hands of rigor mortis. He moved away and sat beside him, concern moving his hand into the lion's den of Levi's head cradled in his arms.

 _I'm sorry_ vied with _It's okay_ with _Are you alright_ with _This was a bad idea_ until the lion stirred, until Levi snatched the offered hand in his and brought it against his lips, held so tight that his knuckles knocked, pressed so hard Erwin could feel the outline of his teeth. His lips parted. His lips pursed.

“Don't,” Erwin said.

So Levi didn't.

And when Levi looked away, when he shut his eyes and his lashes caught on the clumsy weave of military issue bedsheets, his right shoulder strained to touch him with a lost hand.

And when his gatling gun heart shot wave after wave of crimson into an electric green field, and when the sun glanced on the cracked barrel of a draining needle, his right shoulder strained to touch him with his growing hand.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're only into canon compliant fic, this is the/an end. For everyone else, we're almost there.


	12. The Decision

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this arc is going to kill me but i made this bed ill lie in it etc

 

He woke, though the sun had not yet risen. He anticipated reveille to blare at any moment. Then he opened his eyes.

The cabin floorboards creaked as he rose and dressed. Weeds peeked through this or that corner. Not for the first time, he began folding his right sleeve only to remember that there was no reason to. He slipped through it and thought surely he hadn't had as much trouble reconciling with a lost arm as with a found one.

Erwin was cruel to it. The limb had regrown but not the trainee-blade scar on the inside of his elbow, not with the puckered titan-steam burns on his wrist of which he'd once been so stupidly self-conscious. So he _accidentally_ grabbed boiling pots by their sides and he  _accidentally_ gripped a knife or two by its opposite end but he was never again blessed with blisters, never again suffered aches. His blood would never again spill in earnest from beneath the fevered knitting of his flesh.

But he was not immortal. He could not be, because the beast titan had not been. Eren Jaeger had not been. They had not been, when in the blind throes of his transformation, he consumed them both.

He heard a knock. He dreaded it now, hated it, those twin raps. The door opened. He didn't turn but he asked:

“Is there a situation?”

He knew there was none. The titans were eliminated three months ago. Dissolved. The combined qualities of three separate classes of serum did it in one hellish roar, one he had to have explained to him, one he himself did not even recall. Their scouts had found nothing but curdling organic remains rotting where beasts once roamed.

The basement was likewise destroyed.Whatever was in it had been long since tampered and sacked by their enemies, enemies now no more. The titan shifters that had come to meet their arrival at the basement had each succumbed to shock at the roar – and of those their medics had saved in time, none could shift again.

None but himself.

There was a scoff behind him.

“There needs to be a situation for me to come?”

Erwin shrugged into his mug. He drank only water. Once, he had nearly transformed from a weak earl grey. That was the delightful side effect of harboring three serums. An errant gale was enough to curdle his blood. An errant thought.

“It's a fair way away,” Erwin said.

He was the first to suggest that it should be this way. His soldiers had hurriedly fixed up an abandoned cabin off the main road a generous distance away from the walls, walls now shuddering, crumbling now that the spaces once filled by titans were beginning to cave under their own weight.

Erwin did not even step inside for the first week. Every nettle scrape and fluttering leaf stoked his volcanic skin and threatened an unwanted transformation. He'd begged to be left alone, to learn himself and temper his quick-trigger reflexes without the possibility of hurting another. All but one had respected his wishes.

“You missed the commendation ceremony.”

Erwin took a seat and opened a notebook to a fresh page. Hange implored him to record his every thought, every dream. He was beginning to forget last night's.

“I did,” Erwin said.

 _851, 8 March._ _Somehow it seems I may have_

“You were supposed to come. We made accommodations. There was no risk that-”

Erwin crossed it out. “I made no promises.”

 _851, 8 March._ _I ate him again._

“What,we have to squeeze promises from you now? You should have been there.”

_He didn't scream this time. I think he even thanked me. Difficult to hear over crunching._

“I didn't realize you'd become a fan of ceremony,” Erwin said. He sensed movement and turned away still more. He would not see him. He could not see him.

_Woke at three. Paced for two minutes. Controlled breathing. No transformation but still overheated – floorboards charred. Went back to sleep, woke up again at four. Sleep remains intermittent. No change in diet, exercise, etc._

“Looks like your shitty sense of humor's coming back. No, I hated it. I hated the speeches. I hated the staring. It was long and boring.Made me go up twice.”

The medal clanged against the desk. Erwin did not look at it either.

“Something's telling me you’ll just chuck it in a river when no one's looking. Might as well melt it down and give it to a library or something.”

“That would be best.”

_I have a guest today. But not for too long._

It scraped against the table as it was returned to its bag.

“Thank you for coming. I'll see you out,” Erwin said. He rounded the table and opened the door. There were no footsteps behind him.

“Am I that hideous to you?”

Erwin barked a startled  _no_ before he'd even whirled around.

Each time Erwin had unwittingly transformed, Levi was there to pull him out, to carve into his beastly counterpart's nape so expertly as to not even nick a toe. Erwin begged him to abandon his finesse. They would grow back. They would, always and forever, grow back. And he had begun to grow conscious of his actions within the titan with more practice. Even Hange demanded Levi allow him to practice emerging naturally. Levi was apoplectic at the suggestion.

The first time Levi pulled him out, the war had been won. The second time Levi pulled him out, the surrounding forest had been flattened. The third time, Levi had almost pulled him out. Levi did not see the connective tendrils snapping as Erwin clambered out, as Erwin watched Levi's skin bubble and peel from his flesh and titan blood curdle beneath the nails of clawed hands doing the aborted job of a pair of weakened, shattered blades on titan skin like melting steel.

Levi scoffed and shook his head, though the corners of his mouth rose. The skin grafts were healing nicely. Erwin was nearly distracted from the memory of burning meat.

“I don't get it,” Levi said wistfully, and his voice so rarely took on such a quality that Erwin did not immediately answer. He left the cabin. It was becoming difficult to breathe.

Early risers chirped and warbled through budding trees. Levi followed him. He did not cross his line of sight again.

“You've seen it all before. You've seen worse before. Told you the first time it means nothing to me.” He stepped closer. “Don't tell me you fixed me up with a modeling agency for my birthday. I'll help you get your refund, if that's what-”

Erwin stepped away.

Levi huffed behind him. Maybe it had been a laugh. Erwin was beginning to forget these little sounds. Or more likely, he'd never heard them before. He'd never heard Levi laugh before.

“Hange says it could be that I don't see y- that you don't see me enough. It's been a month. No one at base even stares anymore. Almost miss the attention.”

After Erwin had sent half of Maria into a state of panic by bounding back to civilization in titan form with a melting man in his palms, he returned the way he came and burned holes into the forest floor with skin that burned and knit for days in a limbo of half-formation, in a private Biblical Hell.

“I'm sure,” Erwin said. He did not remember what he said he was sure of. He began to pace along a row of oaks with branches that had long ago snapped and burned. Levi followed.

“It's a long way. Maybe I could stay for a few-”

“No.”

“But if-”

“No,” Erwin said with a harshness that forbade dissent.

Abandoning their command post, Hange had tracked him and forced him to transform and emerge naturally, at which point they shook him by his front and demanded that he never resist transforming again when he knew not one but three separate serums boiled his blood. Erwin came to and said to them, “Don't let him.” His body cooled unevenly. His tongue had burned holes in his teeth and still he begged Hange: “Don't let him come here again.”

Levi had returned every week since being discharged.

Now he hurried forward to stride alongside Erwin.

“Hange also tells me you're better at controlling it,” Levi said.

“Marginally.”

“Looks like it. Bet you can shit now without it being an event. And looks like you can touch shit easily enough without triggering it.” He stepped closer.

Erwin stepped away. Although Levi had mercifully never touched him since the incident without asking permission – permission which Erwin categorically denied – Erwin couldn't bear anything less than a world between himself and this man.

“It's different with- with living things. Animals. People.”

“Yeah? Funny. Hange wouldn't shut up about how excited they were to finally be able to high five you when they visited last week. Is it different with different people, too?”

Erwin looked at him. His left brow and much of his right were gone, and yet the shadow of them quirked, the expression familiar, the expression strange.

“Yes,” Erwin said, though truthfully he could never be sure. He turned away and strode on. There were no footsteps beside his own.

“Are you ashamed of me?”

Erwin stopped and prayed the back of his head would not betray the twisting in his brow.

Ashamed. In every waking moment of these three months, he had been consumingly, morbidly ashamed. But not of Levi. Never of Levi.

Yet he said, “Yes. Ashamed beyond what I thought possible-” He took a shuddering breath. “-that you still come here. That you speak with me as if I weren't an animal. As if-”

Erwin swore he was some meters away, and yet at that, Levi rounded him with incredible speed.

“You-” Levi stopped, the hands he'd thrown up as if to grab him frozen inches away and clenching, scar tissue straining over his knuckles.

“When I woke up in that bed, I laughed,” Levi blurted. “Finally, I thought, we're…well, not even close to even, but it's a start. I-”

“Even? What do you mean, eve-”

“Oh fuck off, conveniently forgetting who put you in this position-”

Erwin's voice rose. “I have _never_ resented your decision. _Never_ -”

“Haven't you? Even once? Even a little? Even-”

“No,” Erwin said, and only by the jolt in Levi's shoulders did he realize he had shouted. He summoned every bit of calm he possessed and added, “What you did, whether you knew it would at the time or not, ensured the survival of the human race-”

“I don't care.”

“Levi?”

“Or – I don't want to care. It's done, isn't it? It's over. Charters are handed out like pennies. Old books are turning up. We've nearly got the numbers to mount a full scale expedition beyond the walls. There's this… this fucking energy, this…this life to everything.”

He stepped closer. “I want to be selfish. I want to stop waiting.” Erwin watched the milky swirl of his scorched eye. He saw at once his first face and now this one, and between them a steaming, burning mess of meat and bone. He felt the ankle in his hands, and how generous he was to humanity that he'd waited for the final titan to dissolve before snapping it in two. Levi's hands skirted over his jacket lapels. “I want-”

“Wait,” Erwin breathed.

So Levi waited. And as the trees swallowed his retreating horse, Erwin hoped desperately that he wouldn't. He hoped that all his charming words and almost-touches were returned to the person who was robbed of them, returned to any and every other person on this earth who deserved them more than he.

 


	13. The South

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I used a name here that's a Big Red Flag in a certain other fic of mine but I promise it's only a mythological reference.  
> Chapter contains: self harm

 

Erwin arranged the bottles in the metal chest. If he did transform again and flatten the cabin entirely, he hoped that storing them underground was enough to protect them. It took the better part of the day to read and rewrite Hange's nearly illegible script across the labels of the collection of sedatives, steroids and dozens of other compounds whose effects they was eager to see on him, but he welcomed the distraction.

Hange told him Levi was doing fine. Even that morsel of information was more than Erwin deserved.

He didn't even remember what had set off the transformation that had stripped him of his skin, of half his sight. It could have been a fleeting touch. A stray thought.

The bottles were locked up and buried. It would be some time before Erwin could stomach transforming again. When he felt the embers stir in his skin, a taste like electrified rot sat on his tongue as his bones groaned and split beneath his heating skin and Erwin would rise and open his third and fourth eyes.

He heard the clatter of hooves over a dirt path. Dry stones scattered as a horse came to a stop, as a rider disembarked. Hange must have forgotten something.

Erwin opened the door and nearly closed it in the same breath. Whether or not he would have, he would never know, because a boot kicked it open wide as Erwin backed away and opened his mouth.

“I'm-”

“Shut up.”

“Please-”

“Shut up.”

He did not think, did not ever think Levi would return. What's more, he returned alone. He returned unarmed.

“Levi-”

“Shut up. Sit down.”

Erwin shut his mouth. Erwin sat down. Levi was not much taller even as he stood, yet still he loomed over him. Only his eye remained unbandaged.

“Did you mean to do it?”

“What?”

“Did you mean to burn me?”

“ _No-_ ” Erwin implored.

“Then this changes nothing,” Levi said before Erwin could think anything else. “Do you understand me? Tell me you understand.”

“I don't … I-”

“This shit, this,” he said and pointed to himself. “Changes nothing.”

“Levi, you can't be-”

“I know what you're going to do. You're going to make this into the drama of the fucking century if I don't shut it down now.”

“I hurt you.”

Levi's fists clenched. Erwin didn’t miss his soft, pained groan.

“And I made you a monster. They've translated a lot of the forbidden texts. I read them all. I needed to know.”

“Know wh-”

“I had to know what I'd done to you. What stories people are going to tell about you. What they're already saying about you – how like Lucifer you are, how like Cronos you are. We're trying to spin that you're just MIA and the titan appeared out of nowhere and Hange'll tell you its working but its shit – no one gives a fuck about the truth when they can latch onto their shitty stories so open your shitty ears, old man, this,” he said, clutching the bandages at his collar, “is a flick on the forehead next to what I've done to you.”

Erwin shook his head. He couldn't stop shaking his head. His eyes burned.

Levi stepped closer. “Do you understand? Do you? Tell me you understand.”

He didn't. Couldn't. He could not understand what it mattered to Levi what anyone thought of him, what anyone had ever thought of him. So let them think. Let them sing, let them tell. He was a man from another time. He wasn't supposed to live. He wasn't supposed to survive.

Levi raised a hand to his shoulder. “It was my fault-”

Erwin rose and moved away. “Don't.”

Levi followed. “I didn't let you train, didn't… didn't let you practice getting the hang of the form. I didn't listen, I was too stupid and arrogant and I was afraid, Erwin, I was fucking terrified.”

“Afraid,” Erwin echoed.

It was a testament to how much time had passed, and how unevenly it passed between them that it was Erwin who looked away as Levi held his chin high and unashamedly said:

“I wasn't going to lose you. I thought you'd lose your mind in there or you'd fuse or you'd cook or you'd – something. I-”

Erwin couldn't believe what he was hearing. As soldiers, they knew never to speak nor even think of sparing anyone's life if it opposed their objective. Death was inescapable. Death was an old friend.

“Then kill me,” Erwin said. He couldn't believe he had to say it aloud.

Levi stopped. His jaw slackened in disbelief. Maybe he had misheard.

“If I am a threat,” Erwin repeated evenly, “then kill me.”

Levi's hands curled. His voice became something at once disbelieving and venomous.

“Fuck you.”

 

Levi left in the manner one would to avoid saying something they'd regret. The bag he'd left behind had in it a box of pastries from a small Sina shop with exactly two plates and forks, as if he'd anticipated staying longer. Erwin couldn't understand it, how far apart their orbits spun that even this little gesture was lost to him. He couldn't understand treating a dog that, however it tried not to, could only bite and bite and bite.

The elegant crimson egret illustrated on the side of the box pulled at the dregs of his memory until he realized how many years ago he had stopped at this same shop when he'd caught Levi eyeing something in the storefront display.

His tongue was unaccustomed to the sweetness after having lived so long on hunted hares and the dregs of a failing garden. He couldn't keep it down. He gave his share to the squirrels and wrens.

His arm would not let him sleep. He had already become accustomed to its loss. It's absence had become a part of him as much as the width of his brows and the slope of his nose, yet of all the souls who'd given their arms and legs and souls to his orders, of all the soldiers who gave themselves to the war, the war had given nothing back – nothing but this useless limb he'd already learned to do just well enough without.

With all its scars and little landmarks gone, most nights it didn't even feel like his own, felt as if he'd robbed it from someone far younger, far bolder, far more deserving. Then the buzzing began. The itching. This arm wasn't his. It was never his to have.

He sharpened the ax for two days.

Each cleave would knit before the next strike fell. He sharpened the ax again.

Levi returned. As if nothing had been said to drive him away, he settled into a ratty old couch as if in his own home and regaled Erwin with stories of feverish expansion, of carnivals in the streets, of joys that belonged in storybooks and lullabies. Erwin tried to be comfortable. He tried not to imagine himself transforming by the grace of a passing gale and bringing the cabin down on Levi, on all his new dreams and freer smiles.

Erwin began again the moment he left. For days, he sharpened.

When he thought to heat the blade as well as weigh it with packed stones, it was after three hard, wet crunches that the arm fell away. Mid-laughter, he passed out from the pain. When he came to, he saw the arm boiling in a cradle of singed foliage. The fingers had lost since melted, the skin long ago boiled away. Steam rose through the canopy. How cruel, he thought, for some unknown thing to stoke the hearth in his chest but for this barbaric hacking to affect the serum in his blood in no way at all.

He felt little pain after the initial cut, as much as if a drum of morphine had been poured into his blood. His senses dulled as his stump, which had closed itself almost immediately, began to grow.

He had read of it in his reports. He knew this property of titan shifters and yet he had wished impetuously that he would not be among them. that the cocktail of serums would have affected him in some way, in any way, adversely instead of greatly speeding up the process, instead of returning him his arm by mid-afternoon. By evening, the itching had begun again.

It came off every morning.

The days had begun to blend together, knitted tight by the routine of chopping, of cleaving. He would have never named it addiction, but addiction it was. Only as the last tendon split one morning did Erwin realize that Levi would return that same day.

But when Levi came, he charged right past him and unleashed so many piles of books and maps on his rickety table that it threatened to fold. Then he demanded he choose. North or South.

“Choose?”

“We have enough supplies to split up. We found a load of books singing the praises of all the shit we'd see up north – then last minute, some cadet shows up with half a library of forbidden work his grandad had stashed on what's going on down south.”

Erwin readjusted his gloves. Only his fingers remained unformed – surely, he thought, the regenerative trickles of steam would be negligible. He cast an eye at the table as if in afterthought.

“Start anywhere, I suppose.”

“Read. _Read_.”

Erwin frowned. His glove was ballooning, but he chanced a quick look. Mountains lined the north. It would be perilous to navigate. Yet mountains also bracketed swathes of the south – until they didn't.

He didn't quite gasp, but the look on his face must have been enough.

“South, then,” Levi said knowingly.

It struck him, then, the reality of it all. How just a moment ago this had been a childish thought, a silly promise to distract from sleepless nights and snapping jaws. In several weeks' time, humanity will have touched the sea.

“And these...” Erwin trailed off questioningly. He passed his hands over the books beside the maps.

“Weren't you listening? These are how we compiled our maps. Cross-referencing shit, you know, Hange can give you the details.”

“You brought them here...”

“Yeah?” Levi looked at him as if he'd said something ridiculous. “You'd give me hell if I hadn't. You love this shit, you'll probably finish them in a day.”

“Right,” Erwin said as he recalled that he'd once been fond of reading. He couldn't account, then, for the trove of books Hange had left for him, not one of which he'd even touched. Some, he'd used for kindling.

“You alright?”

Erwin's chest tightened. He'd said it so softly that Erwin wondered if it was truly Levi who'd spoken. Levi's knuckles whitened on the spine of one of the books, obeying their unspoken armistice against touch, but only just. Erwin raked his eyes over the rest of him, admiration and desire for once holding the leash by which they'd been so unrepentantly strangled. He must work outside now, Erwin thought. The broken, puckered shades of his piecemeal skin had evened with the sun's touch. He glowed even in the unflattering dungeon dimness of the cabin. His cracked lips had evened too – he'd stopped chewing them. The dark hair that hadn't been singed off had grown so long that he'd taken to tucking it behind his ears. He was beautiful. He was so cruelly beautiful.

Erwin excused himself.

The steam had coiled from his glove before the door opened behind him. Levi followed him outside to where Erwin sat against the cabin walls, his steps measured as if approaching a wild thing. Erwin never imagined he'd be on the receiving end of that, least of all from Levi. He wondered if he too, had looked so infuriating kneeling at Levi's side after having snapped his wires and thrown him into underground muck once upon a time.

His knees cracked. Levi huffed. “Looks like I'm catching up to you, old man.”

Erwin managed a smile. Levi didn't buy it.

“Don't say no-”

“Levi-”

“Don't say no. Come with us.”

“I can't.”

“Don't say _I can't_ either. Say yes. Say you'll come.”

“No, Levi.”

“It'll only be soldiers. Survey vets. Everyone will know what to do. Everyone will be prepared. Everything will be perfect. It isn't fair,” he said heatedly. “After everything you-”

Erwin touched him. He passed his left hand over Levi's roughened, bronzed cheek as his face crumbled so immediately that Erwin would have jerked away if not for Levi's hand closing on his wrist.

Pressing him closer, Levi muttered into his palm, “Don't interrupt, asshole.” Erwin's smile was less forced.

He demanded the world from a single man. Fight for me. Lie for me. Beg for me. Burn for me. And despite his iron-shackle demands, Levi had opened and he had grown. He comes to Erwin a man with purpose, a man with dreams. He comes to try to drag a creature of the old world into the new. He comes to him full of life and each time leaves with a little less.

Erwin watched him lean into his touch as his regrown nails slipped into place on his other hand and he knew he couldn't do this anymore. He couldn't ask him to wait anymore. He couldn't ask him to sacrifice another ounce of his potential for a man who should have died, who, in all ways but one, had died the moment that needle pierced his skin.

Levi had obeyed his orders. He'd killed him to win the war. Now he must stop grieving. Erwin will make sure of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It gets better. But first it gets worse.


	14. The Lie

 

 

 

Erwin ate little during the day. At night, he gorged. In his dreams, he gorged.

He ate everything and everyone. Some nights, his jaw unhinged if only to take in more, and in others, there were two and three and four of him to eat all the faster, each with as many mouths, each mouth with as many sets of gnashing teeth. He ate so ravenously that one night, he swallowed the sun and the moon.

The arm came off every morning. The birds didn't jump at the thuds anymore.

He didn't hunt anymore, couldn't draw the arrow with a steaming stump. He haunted his hunting grounds even so. The hares still jumped at the sight of him, his crimes unforgotten. Every so often, a fox darted across his path.

Erwin hadn't imagined that Levi would return in less than a week, nor that this would be the last he'd see of him before he left on the much awaited southern expedition, the date of which, Levi said, had been moved up by the eternally restless Commander Zoe to the very next morning.

The malformed speech in his mind rotted into his bones and stiffened his limbs. His little cruelty could wait. Levi would never see the world for the first time again. Erwin would not, could not, ruin this for him.

As they said their goodbyes and Erwin walked him out and into the simmering sun, Erwin wiped the sweat from his brow and unbuttoned his collared shirt – mercifully, Levi had arrived earlier than when Erwin routinely headed into the woods with a weighted ax.

Levi came to his horse, turned, and froze. His brows drew down as he studied Erwin's undershirt.

“You're not eating,” he declared.

“That's not-”

“Is Springer late? How often has he been coming? When's the last time he came? Should we send mor-”

“I am, and no, he's nothing but punctual,” Erwin lied. He didn't like having to persuade Connie to lie to his superior about having brought Erwin his rations, but he liked even less the idea of it to begin with. He was well within his ability and his right to sustain himself.

Levi watched him a moment longer, and maybe it was the prospect of a dream on the razor's edge of fulfillment that held his stubborn tongue where it would have once been flying out of his mouth in a fit of interrogation.

“Last chance,” Levi offered, and Erwin thought he'd been given far too many.

The thud of hooves on dirt and stone drifted away. The next time he heard it, it would be a preamble to a great but necessary cruelty. Erwin dreaded the sound.

Yet again it came, but not from Levi. He was not as interested in giving up the matter of his diet as he had led Erwin to believe, and as Connie so chillingly described, the soldier was even less interested in a second helping of Levi's wrath.

It was unfair to him. He should not have been caught between the whims of superiors, much less between current and former. Though Erwin elected to spare the man of whatever cruel and unusual punishment Levi had prepared for him should he fail to deliver his rations again, he did have a single request.

The gelding did not remember him. When Springer brought him around, the horse nearly tore out of his harness in fright. For days, he snorted and neighed at his post.

Erwin knew it was not that he didn’t recognize him. It was because the horse recognized him, knew him, smelled him, that he pulled away as if Erwin meant to tear him apart. When Erwin thought to come to him with both arms and not with one and a half, the animal was a fraction less opposed to his presence. War horses remember titan-hiss. Erwin wondered if his foals' foals would know the sound.

Routine strangled his days. The nights, he spent picking hearts and minds from between his teeth.

The fox began to sidle closer. Once, it even launched a bouncing leap off his back from a low branch as Erwin stooped under another. The force of it sent him sprawling into the moss, but any animosity he had for the mischievous thing vanished as it splashed away through a shallow brook.

Not a month had passed before he finally glanced at one of the books Levi had left behind. It couldn't close for all the notes lodged between its pages, words written by many hands. Some commanded his attention more than others.

 

 _-_ _Mediterranean_ _(_ _Ask Er_ _win how t_ _o_ _pronounce_ _)-_

 _-_ _Cyclades?? Hange thinks this edition's spelling is right (ask Erwin)-_

 _-Forget it. We're renaming them. Erwin can name the_ _spiky_ _ones when he comes back, Hange gets the-_

 

He realized, then, that these were written by one hand.

The weathered covers bent in his grip. Erwin damned his own wavering will, disgusted that it could be bent by idle scratchings in an old book. He could never again rejoin the legion nor return to within a mile's breadth of another human being without feeling the reverberative shudder at splitting a boy's skull between titanic teeth as if he'd cracked it with his own. He could not chance the memory of it again should he, with the most infinitesimal fraction of his soul, desire the grind and pop of human flesh between his teeth again.

He could not hurt Levi again. He had to hurt Levi for the last time. He could not hurt Levi again.

He crafted the words for weeks. More than once, he was too late to quell the rush of nausea that shuddered through him. Sometimes, he could not even write for the shaking of his limbs. He could not rehearse with a deadened tongue.

The fox returned. It trotted between his feet. It bounced off the back of his legs and barked when it folded his knees. It bounced and played and leapt so close that his outstretched hand carded through its fur, that he had only to reach a little farther before he snapped its neck.

Surely, he thought, as its tongue lolled out of its slackened jaws, surely this shouldn't touch him, he who delivered death a thousand souls. Surely, if he were a monster, he'd be enraptured. Surely, if he were a man, he'd feel remorse. But he felt nothing. He left the body for the crows.

When Levi returned, he returned smiling _._ With the even brown of his skin and the high ponytail that gathered his hair, Erwin could not imagine that this man and the one who'd skirted his parchment hand over his shoulder in a dimly lit office a lifetime or two ago were one and the same.

But of course they weren't. It was never so clear to him as when the man bolted off his horse and leapt unabashedly into his arms that Erwin raised one to rest at his nape and the thought of delivering just one more soul rose not a single hair at his own neck.

Levi pulled away and rushed into the cabin. “I have something-”

Erwin followed him inside. “I must apologize-”

“Don't,” he said, thinking he knew.

“I must.”

“Erwin,” he said heatedly. He gave up the myriad straps on his travel bag and sidled closer, hands roaming over his chest,touch-armistice long forgotten, any fleeting pretense abandoned. He smelled like earth and sweat and salt. He hadn't even gone home to unpack, to bathe. He'd come straight to the cabin. He'd come straight for him. Erwin abandoned the thought.

He drew away. Levi's hands remained where they were, closing on air.

“I was unfair to you. I lied to you,” Erwin said. His throat had long since gone dry.

Levi shook his head. “It doesn't matter-”

“I led you to believe that I enjoy your company.”

Levi froze. He did not even blink.

“I wanted distance and coldness to sever us. I was a coward for not doing it myself, but I've realized I can't be that, least of all to you.” He breathed, and thanked the earth and the sky that the sound didn't shudder in his throat.

“What are you-”

“Any...affection I might have showed you during the war was calculated. Planned to the touch. I needed your cooperation, your morale, and-”

“You're full of shit,” Levi whispered, awed. His eyes grew wider. “This little speech is full of-”

“-and it was so easy. A spar here, a story about a little bird there. You were so easy.”

Levi was shaking. “Easy. Then why all the prancing around? Why not just fuck me?”

“I would not have fraternized so flagrantly with an officer and I think you knew too. I needed you to believe it was…more. And truthfully, I was bored. You were a pleasant enough distraction-”

“I don't believe you. I don't believe you-”

“-until you ruined me.”

Levi did not speak. He could not speak.

“Did you really think I forgave you? Do you think it's easy to see your face – your pitiful, mangled face – you, who turned me into the thing I hate most in the world? The thing every living being on this earth hates most in the world? But I don't hate you. You served your purpose well enough that I don't entirely regret dragging you out of the filth.”

Levi stepped back. His chest rose and fell sharply. His eyes had never been so wide, so impossibly wide. Erwin's ironclad will began to shudder. There should have been yelling by now. Things should have been broken, oaths flung. He should have been angrier. He should have already left.

Instead, Levi's voice shook as he said: “Hange said there might be some shitty side effects w-we haven't seen yet. The serums are fucking with your head. Just – just stay here and I'll-”

“You naive child. I've never been more lucid. I've no secret police to fear, no war to fight. And I have no need for you anymore-”

“Shut up. This doesn't make sense. You're-”

“-but since you're so embarrassingly eager to please, I'll give you what you want. I'm ordering you to leave.”

Erwin stepped forward. Levi stepped back. His heel knocked against the door.

“Do you understand?” Erwin said. “I don't want to see you here again.”

“You're not commander anymore,” Levi breathed.

“And still you keep coming back here like a lost gutter-mutt. Get out.”

“You can't-”

Erwin felt it then, that tell-tale flickering beneath his skin that preambled a transformation. His eyes watered beneath the heated sheets of his eyelids. He summoned all his will and breathed like a man starved for air and as quickly as it began, it ended, and all that remained in his blood were ashes. Steam trickled out of his skin. He had tempered the serum.

When he came to, he saw that Levi was slack-jawed.

“You-you did it,” Levi said.

The cabin spun. Erwin breathed haggardly. He couldn't think.

“Did what?”

“Don't fuck with me. I saw it. You held it back. For the first-”

“First?” Erwin lied. “No, not the first. I've been able to do it for months.”

Levis mouth opened, but no sound came.

Steam curled out of his ignited mouth as Erwin crowded him against the door and said:

“Do you still think you burned by accident?”

 

The door didn't slam. It didn't even close. Erwin's eyes burned but he willed himself to wait for the thudding of hooves, willed the nausea to wait, wait until he couldn't be heard.

At last, the disappearing gallop pulled from him every wretched thing he'd kept leashed. For an hour, he retched. His throat stung so violently that he may as well have swallowed coals. Blood pooled in his mouth and smeared his chin.

His ears would ring for days.

Immediately, his feverish mind spun fantasies – scenes of galloping after him, of confessing to all his wretched lies, of lying prostrate before him and begging forgiveness in the dirt for the rest of his waking life. The images overwhelmed him. They leapt after each sob, chased each aborted shudder of a breath. For an hour, he could not breath but with the jerking gasps of a dying thing. All his precious logic cowered before violent animal despair.

His palms burned as tears pooled into the belated sting of fox-fur scratch.

When he recovered command of his own leadened limbs, he rose on his buckling knees and returned to the room. The bag caught his eye.

He came to it. He fingered the leather clasps, traced crescent grooves where nails once sank into old hide. He unclasped the last of the straps. The rucksack fell and pooled around a single murky jar.

It was cool in his hands. Opaque green sloshed against the sides. He suspected before he unscrewed the lid, but when it came off, he knew. The odor that filled the cabin was nothing he'd ever smelled before and still it trickled into that reptilian, ancestral part of him and he knew like he knew the sound of birdsong and the taste of meat. He lifted a floating weed. The slick membrane wrapped around his fingers. Levi had brought him the sea.

The effort of denying his transformation dragged him out of the waking world at last. He dreamed. He dreamed of moonbeach waves and seaweed rings and children's laughter.

When he came to, he left the cabin and rode into the mountains. He rode far from the crumbling walls. He rode for sixteen years.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying to power through to the end but I need a breather after this one lmao


	15. The Runaway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter includes: suicide ideation, attempts.
> 
> and remember: Erwin's an unreliable narrator.

 

When he reached the sea, he felt nothing. He had already seen it. He had already held it.

For weeks, Erwin stopped only to rest his horse. He traveled light. The impulse to turn back waned after the first week. Every night was a ritual of jumping at not-there distant groans, of stepping into the last smeared footprints of long gone beasts.

He circled the mountainous cliffs of what the old maps called Greece. Wild goats skipped across sheer planes over a churning sea to avoid the wolves overhead. Egrets plucked their meals out of brooks. Water trickled past his boots as he crossed it.

Erwin stopped recording his thoughts after the first week. He stopped keeping track of the passage of time in two. He didn't know, then, when he had circled back to the tallest cliff he'd found on his survey, when he'd unburdened his gelding of its saddle and harness. He knew the sun had just set. He knew the sea sharpened the rocks below.

He stepped forward, and he thought of the Survey Corps. They had celebrated prematurely. He possessed within him the ability to make beasts out of humans, and the ability to command them. The war was not won. Not yet.

He stepped forward, and he thought of his mother. Heretically, he wondered what might have been had he kept his promise to her instead.

He stepped forward, and he thought of Levi. Now, perhaps more clearly than ever, Erwin knew that he could live no lifeunbracketed by the blares of reveille. He knew no life he might share with another unsoured by the devils in his blood.

Erwin stepped forward, and he fell.

He woke to a rushing gurgle, not unlike the soft burbling of the kettle in his cabin.

His eyes snapped open and his heart pounded at the thought of it all being a dream, all of it. All his cruel deception, all his last thoughts, all the regrets that were not his to have.

But it was no dream. He found his body draped across the sands and pulled this way and that by the surging tide like limp kelp. His hands jerked over every part of him in search of long healed bruises, in search of scratches knitted shut, of bones long since splintered into place.

His hair flew into his eyes at a heavy snort near his temple. A horse's muzzle prodded at him like it would at a disobedient foal. The gelding must have dragged him from the rocks. Erwin chased him away.

He tried again. He tried until the goats no longer bothered to turn their heads at his descent.

The arduous swim to shore tempered his anger. He lay in the sand and watched the sun rise.

It was too slow a death, he thought. He recalled the lengths to which he had to go to beat his body's regenerative abilities to remove his arm.

At noon, he climbed back to where he'd left the saddle only to find it gone. He returned to the shore to find it in the sand. The gelding was sniffing for him at the offshore rocks.

Erwin found what he needed and armed the chamber. He pressed it to his nape. When he awoke in a cloud of steam, he pressed it to his head. When he rose again, he pressed it to his heart.

His neck hardened against the press of knotted rope. His throat closed at the first touch of blade shards and poisons and heated coals. He sweated serpent's venom out of his skin. No weight on earth would drag him to a watery tomb when his body changed and rose and breathed again, when again he cheated death of its promised soul.

Erwin pulled himself out of the steaming titan husk. He swam to shore as the carcass dissolved into the sea. Soon, only the bones remained. Then, they, too, crumbled and sank.

The raft that had taken him miles offshore had been destroyed in the attempt. The current toyed with him. He swam for three days. When he crawled ashore, Erwin fell asleep before he had even cleared his knees of the tide.

His stomach seized painfully when he woke, and he couldn’t recall when he had last eaten. Then in came to him, stole his breath as if the realization were a physical thing. He laughed. There was sand in his eyes and ears and everywhere else but he laughed because he'd ignored that most simple answer.

He destroyed his provisions. He made another raft and rowed again into the sea. He could not chance that he wouldn't succumb and drink right from the surging rivulets of a freshwater brook, that his baser self wouldn't throw him to the ground and force him to suck the moisture, if he must, from a stone.

By the third day, every muscle in his body squeezed at the bone. Every movement whittled at his nerves. His joints scraped. His dry tongue pantomimed at wetting his cracked lips, his retreating gums. By the fourth, his hands darted as if of their own will into the sea, his throat swallowing the futile waters.

On the fifth day, campfires crackled on the distant coast. On the fifth day, he realized he had made a mistake.

He ripped a plank from his raft to replace the oar he'd destroyed and rowed. He rowed hard. His limbs crackled, his skin peeled and his hands bled and stitched and bled and stitched but he rowed, rowed with the ancestral taste of human blood ghosting the cracked fissures of his tongue, rowed with the grind of gristle and bone echoing anticipatory in his ears.He rowed but he was not fast enough, he was not strong enough. His throat burned. Steam coiled out of his panting mouth.

He couldn't recall the rest of the journey back to shore except in unfocused snapshots, in memories torn and dog-eared and burned. At some point, he'd left the raft and swam the rest of the way. At some point, he'd begun to grow taller.

The sea frothed at his boiling limbs. The sand hissed and popped under his feet.

A great weight anchored him to the earth as he neared the fireson hands and knees. Distantly, he felt the moon on his back. He could have sworn a moment ago he'd just carried the sun. He heard shouts.

He was going to kill them. He was going to eat them.

For a moment, Erwin Smith the man wrested the sovereignty of his limbs from Erwin Smith the titan. He peered out of the peeling dregs of his titan body – the skin melted and formed, melted and formed. He grasped jerkily at the heated sand for purchase as he crawled back to the water. His breath rattled in his throat.

But it was only a moment. As shouts rose and grew closer, as the imagined sensation of flesh on his tongue colored the world cruel, colored it red, he turned again, and the lights in the sky, one by one, flickered out.

He woke to a rushing gurgle, not unlike the soft burbling of thewashing tide.

But it was not the tide. This time, it was a kettle, the water inside burbling against a fire.

People wandered about him, so he kept still and put together as much as he could with shut eyes. No chain or rope seemed to bind his wrists or ankles. His face was warmed by an open fire. For a time, all he could hear was the cacophony of his beating heart.

He judged the time of day by the rise and fall of curious murmurs around him. Once, he began to make something out.

“Still out?” one said.

“You'd be too, in that state,” said another.

“Any ID?”

“None. Mystery man. Think he's like us?”

“Has to be. You saw him coming out of that thing.”

“But it's been months. You're telling me there's still-”

“I'm not telling you shit, you saw him yourself-”

“Alright, alright. We'll wait 'til he'll talk. Any news?”

“We lost the MP for good. If it weren't for the stolen gear-”

They moved away before Erwin could hear the rest. If these were refugees or criminals, he needn't worry about word being sent of his capture, and that they were somehow similar to himself was, he assumed, the reason he had not been killed on sight. But it worried him even so. Perhaps he had been hasty to think that the war would be over so cleanly.

He allowed himself to be revived. Over the next few days, he tracked the movements of the watch from slitted eyes and learned which trees the moon most shied behind.

As the group moved inside their tents some days later to escape a sudden downpour, he ran. He snatched a set of 3dmg gear, fastened as many straps as he could see as he chargedthrough the torrential rain and shot up into the trees. He was pursued for a time, but without any great urgency. That, or his pursuers were not the unaccounted-for group of titan shifters he had taken them to be. Branches whipped past him. He was soaked to the bone.

As his strength returned to him over the following weeks, curiosity settled thick in his gut. He tempered it by wandering west until he thought it unwise to pass the queen's rapidly encroaching banner. He passed settlements new and old, but none worried the back of his skull like the group that ran from the queen but not from a titan.

He returned to them.

As he scouted the perimeter, Erwin found a far larger settlement than the one he had left. Their farmers had tentatively worked around the uneven terrain by creating a circuitous irrigation system. No banner flew over their homes and businesses. The beginnings of a shipyard grew into the beating heart of a growing harbor. He was proud of them to a degree that shocked him – he knew nothing of them aside from that _something_ that bound them or didn't bind them, knew nothing but their generosity, nothing but their too-familiar desire for freedom.

Over the winter months, he came to know more. Though he never entered the town proper, the mumblings and chatter of hunters and farmers were more than enough to sate him.

The howl that ended the war, he learned, had not ended it evenly. It had not ended it for everyone. Some titans had been created years ago. Some, just the day before. The victims that were the newer of the beasts had not been entirely fused to the titan'sspine, so it was no unusual sight to see someone clambering out of the hot flesh of a dying monster. It was an easy mistake, Erwin thought, to take him for one of these lingering, struggling, unfused humans that the kingdom seemed eager to capture and hide away. To take him as one of their own.

He had never heard reports of humans clambering out of titans. An entire town could not lie. The queen was rewriting history.

That should have been enough. He had his answer. He could leave. He could find an uninhabited cove or a deep sea grotto and try again. If it hadn't been for the campfires, it would have worked. But he found his excuses in the frayed notes of a farmer's harmonica. He found them in the sun pouring into the unfurling sails of the settlement's first ship on her maiden voyage.

He never strayed from the rocky cliff that overlooked the town, but the town did not extend the same courtesy. Erwin took to living in the trees to avoid wanderers and ambitious picnickers. In a nearby grove, he started a garden. He used his gear to climb only when absolutely necessary – he loathed stealing gas from unsuspecting merchants, but he imagined such an insular community would not be quick to sell or barter them to a nameless stranger.

Erwin held that belief sincerely, but before he knew it, it was unnecessary. He had lost count of how many winters had passed, counting instead the ships, the steam engines, the hot air balloons and all the children of the new renaissance. Despite their isolation and the aggressions of the encroaching crown, the travelers that became a village that became a city grew so large that nameless strangers were not the exception but the rule.

After having bartered enough to amass a decent amount of the town's currency, Erwin found the son of the long-retired merchant from whom he had stolen and, as clandestinely as he had taken the gas, returned the amount he owed with interest.

The paved midday streets were thick with people, and though he wore a cloak and hood and had long since grown a full beard, he bristled at the thought of being caught on his first trip into the town. Shoeless children milled about. When they slipped their clumsy fingers into his pockets, he pretended not to see. He left town intending never to enter it again. The next day, he entered it again. The day after that, he entered it again.

He spent his days in a library by the harbor. It was ill-kept, but not from lack of trying. So much material arrived when their ships returned that it took weeks to categorize, and it was all so unusual that the more established bookshops and schools in the center of town had no use for them. When Erwin realized why, the gruff librarian hauled him to his feet before he'd realized he had fallen to his knees in shock. They could not be categorized because they could not be understood. They were not translated. They were not books and pamphlets and maps from the wall but from beyond.

They were the stories of humans beyond the walls. They were the histories of other pockets of humanity clinging to life, fighting for it, dying for it, and they, like Erwin's once-modest, once-little town, had begun to ride and sail and fly.

So enraptured was he by the realization that he began to translate immediately. It was arduous, unforgiving work. He remembered to leave only when the now-wary librarian kicked him out to close up. Erwin wandered through the darkened city, heading back to his treetop home only when all his pockets were emptied by little hands.

Erwin withered under the poorly-hidden stares that only increased in number as he returned to the glorified storage hall. The librarian had made him out to be a spectacle for idle dock hands and wharf rats. However, after seeing just how much the inner-city bookshops were willing to hand over for a first-of-its-kind edition of a foreign text, the former sailor had pen and paper ready every morning, chased off the dock hands himself, and even made tea for Erwin in his own bashful way.

It was from him that Erwin learned why he saw more and more the bulge of pistols in jackets and holsters and even muskets slung over tense shoulders in the streets. Though the first group that settled there were late-bloomers, so to speak, the town drew others – debters, tax evaders, wanderers and all the dregs of the kingdom who were too proud or too poor or too devious and who united by not uniting under the queen's banner, who united under no banner. For a time, they were not even a nuisance. Perhaps they were expected to perish in the wild, or to revert to some antiquated idea of savagery.

But their ships sailed farther with every passing day. Their numbers grew, their technology multiplied. Even so, Erwin thought, surely the queen would not bother this one little corner of the world.

But bother it, she did. Whisperings of kingdom spies stalking the streets and evaluating the city's defenses rippled through every home. Every unfamiliar face, once welcomed, was scrutinized. Some were interrogated, some kicked out. When the city closed its gates to newcomers and refugees, Erwin left.

He himself had begun to come under suspicion. He could not trouble his librarian friend to defend him any longer. The man begged Erwin to take his stock and do what he could with it wherever he went.

As he checked on his garden some days later, Erwin caught several pairs of feet clambering clumsily his way. He broke into a run. His pursuers followed. Turning once to ensure he wouldn't be seen, he used his gear to launch himself into the trees.

“Hey!” came a shout. Erwin peered around the bulky trunk to find a trio of children staring blindly in all directions and rummaging in the undergrowth.

“I know you're there!” said the tallest. He recognized her. Her fingers had been the first to rummage through his pockets on the first day and every day after.

“Why'd you leave?” she shouted. Erwin waited. However they made it past the gates, they would return soon. He would not meddle any more with this city than he already had.

“We're hungry!”

Erwin's coat weighed all the heavier. He peered down at their threadbare clothes, their grimy faces.

He whistled. They looked up, their hands held above them just in time to catch a falling tomato. Before punches flew for it, a second dropped, and a third. He should have left it there. He should have left.

But the girl gave hers to the others to split and stared up at him instead.

“Who are you?” she called.

“An old man.”

“I can see that. I mean where ya from?”

“Nowhere.”

She scowled at him. Her young companions were ruddy with tomato juices.

“Can you read?” she called.

“I can.”

“I wanna read, too.”

His brow rose at that. He imagined, for a moment, coming down and being struck by the lightest thing – a falling twig or a passing gale, and transforming then and there. Of raising his feet to peer at their ashes. He breathed out shakily. No steam emerged.

He heard their grumbling stomachs from even this great height.

Erwin peered ahead in case they were followed. He came down. The girl rummaged in her ratty coat and thrust a few torn bills and coins into his palm.

“Them, too,” she demanded. The two beside her were licking their fingers.

Erwin returned the money. Before she could protest, he carried them to his treetop cabin, replaced their ratty clothing, washed their faces and for the first time in what may have been years, cooked something with more than two ingredients in it. He nearly panicked when he came across the three of them, full-bellied, lying motionless on the floor, but they were only sleeping. They must have been so accustomed to choosing the most comfortable looking corner to sleep in that they neglected to find the beds he'd prepared for them in the very next room. He carried them there. As they slept, he put together a rope ladder.

In the morning, they learned how to fish. In the afternoon, they learned the alphabet. At night, they learned how to set traps.

Occasionally, a new pair of feet pattered their way. They learned the alphabet too.

He measured time now in the coming and going of little feet, of children and no-longer-children squeezed out of the troubled city as it desperately brokered one fragile peace deal after another. They who had seen war still lived. They still knew. They had to know what war was, what war did.

While they slept, Erwin watched the city. Every soul seemed to have their hand in the resistance movement. A great many had already set sail for a large island off the coast. They kept its old name. A third of the city had already escaped to Crete.

On another night, his heart withered at the sight of the queen's forces not three miles from the city. They had forgotten what war was, what war did.

The cabin had been nearly discovered by the queen's wandering troops too many times. They caught more military police than rabbits in their traps.

One final night, ships grander than he had ever seen in his life emerged from the horizon. Sailors wearing 3dmg hopped from ship to ship. He had only ever read of the queen's navy, of her greatest and most beautiful weapon, but now he would see it far more intimately than he'd ever wished.

He woke the children, all twenty-three. They could not stay. Not anymore. They startled the goats as they clambered down the steep cliffs, their cheeks puffy from sleep. The ships were close. Not since the Colossal Titan had something towered over him so menacingly. He bribed a ferryman already besieged by civilians flooding onto his boat and carried the little ones on board. He had taught them all they would know to survive. They didn't need him anymore.

He watched the craft depart from the coast on the tail of two others The fleet did not break from its course toward the city, but the largest ship did. His heart thudded in his ears. He watched her turn to intercept the fleeing boats.

Erwin plunged into the freezing waters. He swam down against the waves until he found it – a large enough grotto to mitigate the energy released during a transformation. Massive pockets of air shot upward as he burst through the collapsed grotto, smothered his titan body in kelp and grabbed still more handfuls of it before he swam back to the surface. He punctured and buckled the hulls of the ships he passed but did not linger.

He approached the queen's darling flagship from below and wrapped wreathes of kelp and weeds about its rudder until the jerking thing fell still. He piled the green mass around it as long as he dared before sailors burst beneath the waves to investigate.

As he swam after the boats, the rising sun caught on the name of the ship etched on a massive rudder blade: _The Ral_.

 


	16. The Father

 

Gulls scattered and cawed as Erwin breached the surface and swam to shore. He couldn't hear the waves over his pounding heart.

He dragged himself onto the sand. He recalled the last few hours as if they had happened to another man, as if he'd seen it all from miles away. How stupid, he thought, how fantastically stupid. He would be found out. Immediately. Nothing else could have made holes like that in the hull of a ship. Nothing else could explain a rudder so suddenly clogged with kelp that lived miles below the surface. He would be hunted, and he would be found.

This last great amorphous fear trickled out of him. He would be found, and at the thought, he lost every care in the world, each of them burned out of him from years of overuse, from years of not once turning his back to another man, years of crafting so many alibis that some nights he earnestly forgot whether he'd been born on the earth or the sun.

He hadn't quite the desire to turn himself in. He realized, distantly, that his most overwhelming concern at the moment was a lesson plan, one he'd been meaning to give before the first mast pierced the horizon. A lesson to children he meant to abandon as he'd abandoned everything, everyone, else. It should have been easy. He only had to turn around.

As he moved inland, he heard the patter of little feet.

“Mister!” they called, because he'd never given them a name.

He only had to turn around. He had only to swim back. But the sun had risen and they hadn't eaten and one of the pair had lost a shoe so he gave them his own and told them to link arms so as not to get lost.

When they found the others, already, half a cabin rose out of a quiet corner of the forest. Already, something smelled otherworldly in whatever was bubbling by an open fire. When they pulled him, speechless, to the fire, one admonished him for not drying his clothes after a swim in the exact cadence Erwin himself had used to warn them of the same not a week earlier.

When he asked where they'd found all their pots, let alone the tools and lumber, the older few led him past the thick of the forest and onto a cliff, much like the one on the mainland. This one, too, overlooked a growing city. For months, maybe years, the denizens of the larger of the two had been quietly sailing for this distant, idyllic little spot that cradled the Aegean.

All their books and notes and precious things were lost. Erwin set the little ones to sleep on a mossy bed with stories of his own to weigh on their eyes and steady their breathing. Stories about gentle things, about summer rains and quiet mornings. About mischievous hares and regal horses. About jackdaws and dancing moons.

Erwin drew up his cloak and hood as he entered town that night, as he searched up and down the seaport for their defenses. The queen had sent a welcome party. She would next send a fleet. But he found no armaments. No mounted harpoons. No turrets. Not even deterrents of a subtler sort – no traps beneath the waters or explosives strapped to the docks' spindly legs. As he wandered about the town, he couldn't find a single weapon that wasn't a butcher's knife or a personal sidearm. They wouldn't last a day.

He had no business interfering. This was not his war. He would finish the cabin, set the table, give that lesson, and leave.

Erwin did all but the last for the next week. After he'd slipped back to the mainland to recover his hidden gear, he returned and gathered more lumber for the cabin. The work gave them something to do, but even so, the air was charged. The smallest cried more often, threw more punches. The oldest bounced their feet and chewed their nails. _The Ral_ 's sails alone could blanket the fledgling town twice over.

 _The Ral_. It was a name from another life. Some nights, he could almost remember the soldier whose name christened humanity's largest, fastest ship.

It returned in a week's time. They had all just eaten. The table had not yet been cleared.

The children raced to the town. Erwin quelled the violent shudder that ran through him, quieted the pounding in his chest and the tightrope tension in his arms that threatened to snap before he plucked each and every one of them and hid them in the cabin. He had no business interfering. This was not his war. These were not his children.

He raced to where he'd buried his gear. This play at normality, at showing little ones how always to brush their teeth and not-so-little ones how never to lose an argument, it was never meant to last.

It was gone. The box that held it was short one harness. He could find another. He could race into town and beat the ships, now five on the horizon, find a boat and sail anywhere, sail immediately. But there, in the corner of the metal box, was a dusty thumbprint smaller than his his smallest finger.

Erwin strode through the cabin. Just before he entered, the sun glanced on the brass knob and blinded him to the quiet darkness of the little rooms. He crossed through them several times before he saw her.

Curled up beside an unmade bed, the girl hadn't yet unlearned the unfortunate familiarity of hard, cold floors. He moved her to the bed. His hands came away trailing dust from her dirtied skirts. He opened her curled hands and found the same. He smoothed her dark, tangled hair from her face and found the same. She murmured in her sleep as Erwin returned with a washcloth.

It was the third time this child had somehow uncovered his gear and hidden away some part of it, and seemingly always when he most needed it. All his searching couldn't help him before so he doubted he'd have more success now, with the terrain so unfamiliar.

She squirmed as he wiped her nose and brows.

“I know you're awake,” he murmured. She shook her head.

He wanted to ask where it was, wanted to ask why. The first would grant him silence – he swore he had never heard a single word from this one and had half a mind that she was mute - the other he pretended not to know. He only wondered how this child possessed such a keen sense for when he was most determined to leave.

He stroked her hair as he eyed the winding forest through a window. At the first hiss of wire or stomp of booted feet, he would leave, gear or no. He looked down at her and again fought the shudder that demanded he take the weightless, nameless girl into his arms and take her away, far away.

But he had no business interfering. This was not his war. And he prayed that if he said it enough, he would finally begin to believe it.

Shouts echoed through the forest. He stood, but small hands grabbed at his shirt. The shouts grew closer. Her eyes shot open. She heard them, too. She trembled.

Mind made up, he took her into his arms and raced out of a back door. She clung to him desperately – he could barely breath with her grip around his neck. As he came to a fork, however, a shriek stopped him. Then came another. They weren't harsh sounds, not sounds of pain or warning. As they came closer, he caught still more sounds, like squeals of laughter.

Warily, he returned to the cabin to an explosion of greetings and a dozen and a half simultaneous accounts of what they had just seen. The older set diligently shepherded the excitable ones away and took the child from his arms as a pair pulled him outside, and the thought came to him for the first time that not two decades ago, these two would have long since chosen between the rose, the unicorn, and the wings.

It worked, the girls said. The people protested, they did what you said, they told him. He could hardly put two and two together over their excitement.

His blood ran cold. He had done no such thing except as an aside at the table one night, a stray observation that if the town were ever to survive the crown's imperial might, it would not be by the gun or the sword. When one of them had pressed him, not three days ago, how they might stand their ground, he'd joked that their best chance might be to not stand at all.

He asked the two how the town could have possibly known what he'd said and they only laughed and asked him what he'd thought they'd been doing every night since they were forced to flee.

They said it as if it was patently obvious, and maybe it was. It may not be his town, but it was theirs. Theirs to walk, theirs to mobilize, theirs to rule. They recounted in great detail how everyone, from dock hand to taxman to governor, had lain prone in the streets the moment the crown's ships arrived, laying motionless even as the royal admiral stepped on their shores. Even the rats, they swore, went belly-up.

Erwin allowed them to watch the town and report any changes, imploring them to not set a single foot in the admiral's direction. He had heard enough of the Karanese noble-born tyrant who, Erwin suspected, had been the architect of the crown's imperial designs.

Six hours had crawled past when the scouts returned, quiet and slack-jawed. Erwin checked if they were followed, checked for injuries, for disguised limps, but before he could press them for more, a sharp whistle snaked through the air. He followed them to a cliffside that overlooked the town as red flares shot into the sky, as teeth snapped in his ear.

They finally spoke, but he couldn't hear. He heard only ringing, felt only slick blood across slippery reins. He couldn't see beyond the rain in his eyes.

He was sure his eyes had been open, but now they opened in earnest to the pair hovering over him, and the treetops over them. Pops shuddered through the air. They crackled through his ribs.

He asked, no, demanded to know why the town was firing flares. Red flares. They spoke but again he couldn’t hear them, again the air whistled and popped and horses lay across the forest floor, bellies caved in, hearts by their ears and legs like snapped twigs. He stepped away from a rotting arm, nearly tripped on viscera winding like snakes in the grass.

One walked right through the decomposing arm to take his bloodless hand in hers. At some point, it had stopped raining, but none of them were wet.

The arm was gone, and the innards with it. The smell remained. It remained in the air, in the grass. It remained in the tea thrust into his hands once he was led, as if a child himself, back into the cabin. He shook with every pop.

Finally, when he was sure the noises had stopped, and when the smell of rotting flesh became halfway bearable, the girls told him for what must have been the fifth time that the town was celebrating. The flares were not flares but fireworks. The demonstration worked. The governor and the admiral were discussing a peace treaty. They were free.

Erwin couldn't sleep. The explosions returned and painted the forest red. They skinned him, rattled his bones. He snapped too-viciously at an older boy, nearly a man, for slipping out a _Pa_ in an effort to comfort him. He reprimanded nothing as severely as that word, and any like it. He was no such thing.

Teeth gnashed behind his eyes.

The ships remained in port for the next few days while the terms of the treaty were supposedly discussed. Erwin thought it odd that a man of the admiral's reputation would bow to this protest so readily. It burned in him now, this certainty that the crown had other plans. It was too fast. It was too easy.

But it wasn't his business. It wasn't his war.

More and more often, the children returned from the town with strange things – jewelry of an extravagant, unfamiliar make, objects he had no name for and whose function he couldn't begin to guess, and what snared his attention most: journals. Maps. Articles and things printed on parchment and wood and stone and metal, Letters the kids took for decorative things before Erwin translated what turned out to be a cookbook that used ingredients he did not even have names for.

His translated pages circulated wildly among them. They begged for more. Even as the ships departed, Erwin translated, and never without a tight circle of little onlookers scribbling messily in their own notebooks.

One night, he found the missing harness in his bed. He searched for the girl without a name, still so because she knew not her own and rejected all suggestions, but it seemed she didn't want to be found. He brewed a cup of tea and left it on the table, a truce of their own.

The leather was familiar in his hands, and not. He had worn it for many years, but never once for its intended purpose. He had acquired it after the war. His old harness, his old books, his old tie – he had abandoned all of it. Erwin hid the box with his gear somewhere else, though he doubted it would stay hidden.

 _The Ral_ returned. The news was met with far less trepidation from the children than the last time she appeared at their shores, but Erwin didn't share in their growing enthusiasm. At every turn, he expected the shot in the back. The crown could take the town in a day. He believed nothing he heard.

He believed even less the children's gushing about this admiral. He learned that many of these things, these gifts, were from him directly. Maybe it wasn't as out of character as he assumed. Maybe he was kind only to the children of the people he conquered.

Her mast became a familiar sight. She returned often, always with dignitaries and cargo and a great wealth of exchange that would have been unthinkable just a month prior. Even so, Erwin didn't venture down to see the gleam of her proud polished hull for himself. He was content with these precious articles and pages, and he swore they grew in number each time she returned, grew in other ways, too. The first pages had been common things, but advertisements became dense, personal journals, and old newspapers became treatises and tomes. After a month, he had recovered no less than five languages with a dozen regional dialects between them. He could not say where his translations went after he was finished with them. He didn't care. The doing of it was its own reward. It became easier to forget who enabled his hobby, easy until it was not.

He dried the boy's tears with his sleeve as he mumbled that he'd done what Erwin had made each of them promise never to do – to reveal where they lived to anyone, anyone at all. It went unspoken, of course, that Erwin looked the other way when the _anyone_ in question was no taller than his waist and owned only the clothes on their back. This was not one of those anyones.

Erwin chided him softly, but not for long, as the boy seemed to realize his mistake. He ushered him inside to eat something, to calm down, as Erwin fought away a sudden inexplicable memory of his father, an image that appeared unbidden and one he refused to understand why, yet something still willed him to find the boy again, to tell him it wasn't his fault, to tell him that if anything came of it, anything at all, it was not his fault, and he wouldn't leave the poor child be before he repeated it like he meant it, like he believed it.

He paced up and down their garden path and deliberated his next course with a detachment that could not have been more pronounced than if his head had parted from his body. His heart was beating as it should, his hands steady when they swayed as they would in a soldier's stride, one that no length of time or distance traveled would bend.

Relief bloomed in him. It was a quiet, lazy thing. Every last corner of him was filled to burst with it, with the quiet acceptance of a long hunt coming to a close. And no one, he thought, was more fitting to find him than this admiral, the face of the greatest navy, the grandest army on this earth.

One day passed, then another. On the third, Erwin stopped dreaming of manacles and gags quite as vividly. On the fourth, _The Ral_ left port, and Erwin was sincerely disappointed. He thought it entirely possible that whatever the boy had said, the admiral could simply not have heard over the persistent roar that rose higher and stronger with the ship's every reappearance.

They were visited instead by a succession of small trading vessels that the children rose before dawn to meet in time to watch the crews disembark. The foreign letters and documents poured in. The cabin was kept up entire nights debating how this or that word was pronounced aloud.

It was as he quieted them after one of these debates and readying them all for sleep that he came across a newspaper not two days old. He nearly tore it up on sight. He abhorred nothing more than the date, the time. He didn't know how many little feet he'd washed. “A lot,” was enough. He didn't know when he had last seen the walls. “Long ago,” was enough.

He should have destroyed it. He should have, but he didn't. He smoothed over the page that caught his eye, a casual aside in an entirely unrelated article that claimed that that day marked four months since the crown's former Karanese admiral had been indicted on charges of conspiracy and manslaughter, four months since he was replaced by another.

A few mornings later, he began to mark the essays he'd assigned the night before and still his hands trembled so violently that he could not put pen to paper. It was his own fault. How earnestly he claimed to need to exist outside of time, outside of human preoccupations like wealth or love or poverty or war even as he thrust his meddling hands into all of them.

He knew that man. Knew of him. He knew enough to craft such elaborate scenes in his mind, branching paths of what might have been, should have been. In one, he merely shakes his hand and the admiral goes on his way. In another, he's cornered and shackled like a beast and shipped off like one. In yet another, he's killed outright. And in between them were a thousand, a hundred thousand more.

Erwin listened to the bubbling laughs and shrieks of play outside, of the diligent page-turning and pen-scratchings of the quieter sort inside. As his heart steadied, someone decided at that moment to clamber wordlessly into his lap. The nameless child curled against him and went on reading a journal he'd translated, the pages crinkled. Swirling shapes decorated the margins. His hand steadied as it passed over her hair.

A boisterous commotion rose outside, one that often greeted any of them who returned from a night or an afternoon in the town. Erwin returned to the essays, the pages painted red by the setting sun.

As he marked them, the noise grew louder, a din of cheers and laughter. He smiled. They must have returned with something exciting from the market.

There was a knock. Two raps, sharp. Low on the door, near the knob. Then another pair, louder.

Erwin stopped writing. The door opened.

The children rushed in to show all their books and their writings and their art and music and toys to their guest as Erwin's eyes sank into the loop of a sloppy letter e and he realized that all the world's poets and philosophers and artists were wrong because time doesn't stop, but it can collapse, and time collapsed when Erwin stared at an essay and a requisitions form and a letter of apology and a notice of death and an invitation to a gala and he sat in a cabin and in an inn and in a carriage and in an office and in an electric green field.

But time returned him to his essay and his cabin as boots crossed the threshold, as hair was ruffled and sincere compliments given to each _Look at this_ , to each _I made one, too,_ praise and kind things in a voice that entered the air like a physical thing, a voice that even at its softest was at once the bite of a blade's edge and the groan of a tempest-tempered hull.

The laughter became a murmur became a silence. Nothing rustled. Nothing moved. The only sound in the world was the fall of heavy boots and the groan of wooden floors. The corners of a little bed were smoothed out, tucked in. The pantry was opened and shut. A finger trailed across a windowsill.

Little hands tightened in his shirt. Erwin followed the girl's eyes as the shark that had so liesurely circled the cabin ended its spiral with them. Erwin's eyes stopped at the raised line of the royal admiral's chain across his chest, its soft clinking muffled by a fitted jacket. Erwin didn't look up. He couldn't. The admiral's hand slipped into a pocket large enough to hold a firearm, to hide a blade.

Erwin couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He'd abandoned his script. He ignored the stage directions. He was supposed to be furious. He was supposed to have long since kicked him out, shouted him out, should have long since forgotten this knock and this stride and this voice. Years of playing a part were ruined because Erwin couldn't move.

The nameless girl whimpered. The admiral's hand stilled. He took it out slowly, curled over something that fit in his palm. With his other hand, he turned his palm up. Erwin watched from his periphery as the girl offered her journal to him. He flipped through the translated text.

“Who did this?” he asked her. Erwin's ears rang. She couldn't speak. He had to say something now, anything. He opened his mouth, but he was beaten to it.

“Papa.”

Erwin's eyes shut. His breathing rattled in his chest. The moment stretched long, too long. He couldn't see his face. He didn't want to see his face. He desperately wanted to see his face.

“Can we trade?” the admiral asked her, and Erwin must have imagined that something changed in his voice, that the blade dulled and the hull splintered. The admiral slipped something into her palms. She examined his offer. She nodded. He stroked her hair, his palm skirting over where Erwin's was not moments ago.

The door clicked shut behind him. Erwin opened his eyes. His hands and feet were frozen and bloodless. Stars winked and warbled in his eyes. The cabin began to thaw, though no one said a word to him, no one dared. The nameless, though evidently not mute, girl shifted in his arms and watched the light play on an old bolo tie in her hands.

 


	17. The Admiral

 

She wore it on rainy days. The stone clicked against the buttons on her dress.

Erwin made the fire and set the table. He read with Johannes and hunted with Alice. Susanna asked idly about the role of the Utopian Garrison and by the afternoon, she was an expert. He learned that one was abandoned at birth, that the other had become lost during a settlement raid. He learned and relearned their names, their birthdays, their favorite books and seasons and sounds because he should have known before, long before, and because something, everything, anything, had to help him forget why he suffocated when he looked at the child with the green stone.

And for a while, it worked. He pretended until he forgot that he was doing it at all.

This while begins and ends with the growing tower of untranslated documents on the kitchen table. The broad sheets and bound journals were an endless fascination turned horror and still they came, and still the children asked why he had stopped, why he would not even teach them how.

When three days passed without an army at his door, Erwin took it to understand that the admiral had no intention of alerting the kingdom to the location of the last titan on earth. When five days passed without an army at his door, Erwin took it to understand that the admiral himself may just as well have stumbled upon him, may have no desire to ever return, may be as desperate to forget.

The admiral. The admiral. If he said it enough, it would be all that man had been. If he said it enough, the splitting hole between his ribs might yet stitch itself closed.

He caught Kristina attempting to translate a trade agreement, and Leon the morning after with a religious text still thick with the dust of the ruined chapel in which it had been found. With the texts in their hands and scribbled twice over with their attempts, the image of the admiral appeared to him hazy and unfamiliar until he did not appear at all. Tentatively, Erwin corrected her work, then his. The next day, he corrected them again. The day after, he gave one a lesson on cardinal declension and the other on the admittedly long list of irregular verbs that had given the boy so much grief.

The day after that, the tower was no more. The challenge of translating the texts demanded so much of his attention that his mind could not, did not, wander. When more journals and treatises turned up in the kid's jacket pockets and satchels after a trip through the town, Erwin asked no questions and demanded no answers. If this could have gone on for months, it could have worked. If it had gone on for much longer, he might have been able to forget again.

But whatever his life may have been was severed from the one that was to be by another too-familiar knock. The door opened before Erwin could connect the knock to the fist. His head rose from the lesson notes he had been planning for when the kids returned for supper.

The admiral strode into the cabin he'd set foot in only once before as if he knew every chip in the wood grain and every nail in the floors and he slammed a book onto the table before Erwin could think to move, and over his shoulder on his way out, he called, “Write larger.” He shut the door behind him.

Erwin stared at that door until it opened again and little feet pattered into the room excitedly, and then warily as they spied the supper-less table and the unmoving Erwin.

He moved as if he were a stranger in his own body as he supped them and read their stories before bed. Selfishly, he hoped at least one of them would stay awake, that one of them would toss and turn or rise from a nightmare so that he could hold them in his arms and forget the ghost in the other room.

But ghosts can't be touched. They can't be held or read or leafed through. A day passed before Erwin could look at it again. That the admiral's second appearance had been so informal, so short, so blunt and so thoroughly untroubled only fueled his certainty that it must have been a hallucination, book be damned.

But he touched the book. His fingers ran down the bowing vertebrae of its bent spine. After one night, he opened it. In another, he read it. On the third, he translated.

On the fourth, he couldn't find where he had last placed it. He thought to ask the kids if any of them had taken it, but he stayed his tongue. Of course one of them had taken it. They had taken all the others. If he asked and they told the truth, he would know. If he asked and they lied, he would know. He considered that string from the beginning of his days to their ends, but he couldn't pull it. It was not his to unravel. Not now. Not yet. Not ever.

He understood soon enough that it would not wait for him to pull.

Not a full day since he'd lost the book's whereabouts, the knock came again, and with it, the admiral, who left a collection of scrolls on the table and drawled over his shoulder that Erwin's sevens look too much like ones. He left as suddenly as he came. Erwin hadn't taken two breaths before the door had opened and shut.

Alice waved the bass she caught that morning and knocked Klaus clear off his feet as it slipped out of her grasp and slapped him across the face. As Erwin tended to the angry rash that spread across his cheek, he caught Leon peeking into one of the scrolls that Erwin had hidden behind a bookshelf. He let the boy translate the burial rites within the crumbling things with his supervision. When they finished, Erwin hid them again.

The next day, Erwin returned from a hunting trip to find the scrolls gone, new material on the table, and on it a note saying only:

_Footnotes too._

Erwin studied the note for hours. Helpless to this perpetual disregard for each and every one of the conventions of business and conversation, he felt himself at once a hostage, an accomplice and a partner. A caged man, a free beast. He burned himself into a fever wrestling the hands of impossibility that held his throat and squeezed, that yanked the thread from his hands and pulled.

The sun rocked low in the sky's cradle when Erwin hiked up a forested path and unearthed a box. He didn't plan it. But his feet bent as he knelt and his hands fumbled with the lock latch and his eyes followed the crossings of leather and buckle, the grooves and scratches on burnished metal. He wondered as he rubbed the reinforced leather if this marked the first time in his life that he would see this equipment without blood in the stitching, without brain matter long since dried on clips and buckles more often than he'd seen it soiled. He wondered if he'd passed that milestone long ago, wondered whether he ever would.

One text disappeared and another took its place. Sometimes, the admiral caught Erwin at the table. Sometimes, he left a note. Erwin never did get a half-decent look at him with the speed of his coming and going. Some days, Erwin forgot why he had made such a fuss of it at all. Some days, there was no before and after. Some days, he forgot he knew how a man screamed when bitten in two.

That morning, he remembered.

Erwin had just taken a seat and flipped to the page he meant to read to his rapt audience when the knock came and the door opened. His eyes froze on the page. He waited for the drop, the remark, and the shutting door. The one-two-three. The formula. The promise.

But there was no book on the table, no immediate remark, and as Erwin bade the children outside, the shutting door was no longer the end of the exchange.

Erwin took a seat as a dark, weathered hand flipped through a book sharply until it stopped at a particular page, turned it around, and pointed to a paragraph on the seasonal effects on olive grove flowering.

“This part is wrong,” the admiral said.

Erwin followed the pointing finger. With what felt like the last breath to ever again pass his lungs, he inhaled sea salt laced with old leather, with strange spices and black tea. It calmed the shudder in his hands. It spilled into his eyes and wrapped around his throat. Erwin reread the incriminating passage and found that another's hand had crossed out his work and replaced it with their own.

When he found his tongue, Erwin said, as if this exchange was as natural as birdsong, as routine as summer rains:

“Your editor mistook the fourth declension for the third. I was correct.”

The admiral turned the book back around as sharply as he'd handled it before. As he studied the passage and flipped back and forth through several pages, Erwin's eyes followed slack-jawed titanic maws pouncing and winding and flying up and down sun-smothered arms and crawling past white sleeves folded at his elbows and rustling behind a vest – too hot for a jacket – as he bent over the table in concentration and smoothed away the lily-white cravat that began to slip from behind leather lapels. Erwin's eyes shot back to a leering face in the grotesque mass of them wrapping around his arms. He looked into the hollow eyes and remembered the sound a man made when he is bitten in two.

“Shit.”

Erwin's eyes shot up at that, but the milky white and slate pair didn't meet him. Erwin followed his eye to the corrected text. He examined the distinctive slant. He followed the generous curves. Elegant. Familiar.

The admiral shut the book. Erwin's hand shot between the pages before it closed. He opened the page again. He stood and listed through the others. Erwin looked up and at last the admiral met his eyes but it didn't matter anymore. Erwin knew that hand.

“Who corrected this?” Erwin demanded.

The admiral didn't answer. His brow quirked as if he hadn't expected him to say anything at all, least of all this. He tucked it under his arm and strode for the door.

Erwin followed. “Who corrected this?”

“What does it matter?”

“Have you hurt her?”

The admiral stopped. He turned around. The titans on his arms laughed at Erwin in the shifting light.

“How do you know Emilia Brandt?” the admiral asked. His jaw slackened. Something fell into place in his mind and on his face.

Erwin opened his mouth, but the admiral interrupted.

“She was one of your brats, wasn't she?”

No, Erwin wanted to say. He'd only given her a meal or two or three. Never, Erwin wanted to say. He'd only taught her everything he knew.

“Your daughter,” the admiral started and, before Erwin could protest, said, “is the high cultural adviser to the queen.”

 


	18. The Daughters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for leaving kudos/comments. I've added chapter titles.

 

Weeks passed without the admiral's return. There were no more knocks. There were no more books. Erwin didn't miss him. He didn't miss the scrolls and strange texts. He didn't miss the harsh sea-tempered drawl. If he said it enough, he would believe it.

He tasked the children to search libraries, ask passerby and peek into records offices, but nothing gave him the barest idea of this position within the royalty nor even of its existence. He let the matter go.

On two separate occasions, he found the nameless girl making black tea with loose leafs. The aroma lingered in the cabin.

One morning, Erwin caught unfamiliar steps nearing the cabin. He hung the last of the shirts and trousers on the clothesline and helped a little one hop off an upturned basket from where he'd been assisting him. Erwin ushered him inside as he watched from behind the cabin, no stranger to the occasional lost hiker and in no mood to entertain. Two men huffed after a woman who seemed to fly on her feet despite the harsh climb behind them.

When her tempestuous knocking went unanswered, she turned to speak with the two stragglers and scratched her chin with a pinky nail. The gesture was so familiar that Erwin nearly gasped aloud. He strode into the open and in an instant could not breath for the stranglehold the three had on him, all the while shouting and laughing and crying.

They talked well into the night about the places they'd seen and the things they'd done after the three had gone to make their own way into the world. Mark and Henrik bragged about their upcoming expeditions to the east. When Erwin finally asked, Emilia explained that her relationship to the crown was its best kept secret. After the circuitous political games fueled by the former Karanese admiral, the queen thought it best to keep her inner circle out of the waiting eyes and ears of greedy men.

Erwin listened in mild shock. Surely, it was only yesterday that tomato juice ran rivers down little faces, little hands, only the other day that an obstinate girl demanded a lesson from a monster. When he asked Emilia how she could have possibly fallen into the queen's favor without the platform of noble birth or wealth, the three shot each other looks, at first proud but then, something else. One picked at his nails. Another chewed at his lip. Emilia took Erwin's hand and met his eye with something like nervousness, something like daring.

“Same way you did, Mister Smith.”

He kicked them out.

Somehow, he knew that would not be the end of it, even as he crossed to the other end of the island because his throat burned and his hands shook and this was never supposed to happen. These two lives were never meant to meet. He often wondered if it was possible to not hear his own name for so long that it ceased to exist. That Erwin Smith would cease to exist.

He heard her clamber up a sheer cliff with the same balancing technique he'd taught her what seemed a dozen days ago, but may as well have been as many years. She lay prone when she reached the top and breathed heavily. He clenched his jaw shut before he said something he'd regret, but his heart thundered and he thought he heard a distant howl and this charade was ending too fast, too soon.

“No one else knows,” she finally said. She sat beside him. “And no one told us,” she added. “And no one knows we know. And no one knows that anyone knows we know. And no one-”

“Enough,” he said.

Trade ships punctured the gentle marriage of sky and sea in the early dawn. They watched them until the sun slipped out of the horizon.

“You want to ask me something,” she said.

“No,” he lied.

“Tch.”

Erwin turned sharply, but it was only the two of them.

“He took us in,” she said.

Erwin turned to her. His heart hammered in his ears.

“Oh, none of us knew,” she went on. “He just found us on our crappy little sailboat and hauled us on board before we popped our fifth leak. He was still captain, then. Tried to get anything out of us so we fed him a cover story and he pretended to believe it. Mark and Henrik went for the Survey Corps soon as we touched land, with the way he talked it up. None of that recruitment poster shit. Just...honest. Real. I stayed.” She shrugged. “Felt right.”

She spoke just like him. The same flattened tongue, the same drawl.

“I loved the ship, even the grunt work, but he caught me once with a book and that was it. Hauled me off to the capitol himself to meet Hist- her majesty. It was too fast. I panicked. I begged him to tell me why, why put his name and reputation on my ass. Said he'll tell me if I told him who taught me.”

Erwin waited.

“I didn't say. So he didn't either. Just some throwaway 'You remind me of someone' or whatever...”

Erwin looked over her, noticing only then that she wore nothing that even suggested she was of noble-stature, let alone an adviser to the crown.

“And all this secrecy-”

“There was a military coup. A failed one. Sloppy. You woulda laughed. The Karanese guy runs his network for years all nice and neat, then gets full of his own shit and starts mistranslating peace treaties to justify wars and keep the crown occupied while he and his pals stir the shit at home. Mark and Henrik led the counterintelligence teams. I coordinated between the Legion and the crown. Queen saw me at work and wanted me to stick around. He oversaw the whole counter-coup. Said it was almost nostalgic.”

Erwin rubbed his wrists. Voices returned to him, nobles' voices, traitors' voices, sounds frayed by time's spinning reel. _Just the other day, your right hand man-_

He cleared his throat. “When you said 'None of us knew'….”

She didn't speak for a time. Her eyes flitted this way and that, the way they always had. The way they had when she'd struggled with her history, or when asked to recite a mournful poem.

“The war ended decades ago. Records are missing. People's memories are shaky. Some are trying to deny now that it happened at all. No evidence, they say. The bodies evaporated. The walls are gone. The soldiers who saw them first-hand are dying. They say it was mass hallucination, there was something in the water or the air, anything to brush it under. Like a bad fairy tale.”

She looked at him pointedly. “Don't look so shocked. You do it, too.”

“You can't expect me to tell children-”

“We were fifteen and sixteen when we left. We never knew. Not the details. We could have taken it. We would have understood.”

“Would you have? Would you have understood who – what – I am? What I've done? What I've had to do? Would you have understood that if we had met just a little earlier, you and Henrik and Mark all the rest would have already died by my orders? Would you have-”

“The admiral thought so.”

“What did he say?” Erwin demanded.

“You can ask him yourself.”

Indignation rose in his chest. “Do you coordinate with him, then? Pass these letters and books back and forth as a game? To see how long I'll stand it, how long until I lose my mind?”

“Have you ever told him to stop coming?”

Erwin didn't answer.

Emilia stood to stretch her legs.

“I was going to say,” she continued, “None of us knew who you were, not then. And then the boys spend a few weeks in the Corps and, well, people talk, but it was just a theory. I had no idea who's translations I was getting. We thought there was no way it was the great Erwin Smi-”

“The great,” Erwin echoed. His head fell into his hands. He shrugged off the reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“Then a few weeks ago the admiral calls us three together and just…tells us who you are. Just like that. 'Your dad's the great commander Er-'”

“Stop.” He meant it to be firm, but the ghost of a sob that came didn't agree. He didn't bother moving away from the hand again.

“Sorry. This isn't my scene. I don't know what to say or how to say it.” She knelt in front of him and peeled his hands from his face. She even had his frown.

“Except this much. He's a private man, but he's my mentor. I see things. I know he doesn't – didn't – drink, but about since I've been getting your translations, there's been a lot of...a lot of noise and locked doors at night. A lot of broken things in the trash the next morning. He talks the big talk about choices, about having no regrets. But I don't think hypocrisy agrees with him. Or with you.”

Erwin didn't know what to do with that. He couldn't forge the image of it in his mind. It was impossible. Improbable. It's been too long. The admiral should have forgotten. Erwin should have forgotten. The world should have forgotten.

But the Karanese admiral forgot. The people who deny the titans, even the walls – they forgot. He was placing himself in the company of warlords and revisionists. He was not slaughtering or conspiring or selling untruths but he didn't have to. He only had to stay silent. He only had to avoid and gloss over and sweeten. He had wished so desperately for another life when death so often looked the other way that he hadn't realized he had long since created one. Erwin Smith the commander would have detested Erwin Smith the runaway. The commander led the army that ended the war. The runaway refused to teach the lessons that would prevent another.

The next day, Erwin gathered the eldest and started from the beginning, started small. Once his breath stopped catching quite so often, once his hands stopped shaking quite so violently, he might permit himself a longer lesson. A better lesson. Many years ago, there were three walls. Many years ago, there were titans.

One day, he would amend that thought. One day, he would shake off the last shackles of shame and vanity and say that many years ago, there were titans, and when asked if there could possibly be any left, any that remained on this earth, he would not give a vague shake of his head, not give a terse no and quickly move on. One day, he would say yes. One day, he would say that there was, that there remained just one more.

He didn't know how much time passed since Emilia and the boys said their goodbyes and left for the capitol. Every lesson lasted a hundred years.

He didn't know, then, how long since their departure it was when he came home and found a single book on the kitchen table, and on it, a note that read:

_This is the last time I'm using the brats as couriers._

Erwin was unsettled by the immediacy of his body's reaction to the message. His gut twisted. The note nearly dropped from his unsteady hands. And still he wouldn't put a name to it. He refused to acknowledge it. But playing the game was suddenly far more tiring. His part demanded more of him, and he was no longer a method actor. He stopped lying by omission to the children, slowly, gently. And something in him, some impatient and demanding and obstinate part of him he swore he'd abandoned long ago began to demand the same for himself.

The note did not say he would ever return. It did not say he would never return. No amount of staring and hypothesizing would answer his questions. Erwin quieted the roar in his mind by opening the book. It was another in a series of botanical tomes. The last section was an extensive one on carnations.

The sun hadn't yet set on that day when the book was gone. Erwin busied himself about the cabin and tossed and turned despite all his efforts to tire himself out of his own reeling mind.

It usually took days, often weeks before Erwin received another text, so he needed a moment or two to ground himself and confirm the time and day with one of the eldest when he heard the children's distinctive laughter. He knew when they returned from town on their own – the sound was sillier, chaotic. When another was with them, their laughter ebbed and flowed, quieting as if to hear another speak, and then erupting at their words.

Erwin stepped outside and quieted his tangled nerves. The admiral rose over the crest of the hill on thick boots, now vest, too, abandoned in the heat. The sun slipped into the white of his collared shirt and Erwin was blinded.

It was little retribution, Erwin thought as he caught the look of that single, scorched eye and its steel partner. The admiral looked up and his face shifted from such a disarmingly tender expression that Erwin felt as if he had intruded just by looking, and at once it became one of pristine neutrality.

Erwin swore the air hummed as the admiral drew closer. He couldn't move. He was sure that if he did, the air would scream. Only when he came less than a meter's length apart did he notice the bundled pages in his hand, only when that hand rose in offering, only when Erwin's own rose to take it.

But the admiral didn't leave. Not yet. The children had long since grown bored and gone off to play, but the man remained and so did Erwin.

“Do you wanna keep doing this?” the admiral asked.

Erwin's mind halted, but not for long before it started back up and ditched its brakes. Surely, the admiral meant this unorthodox exchange of books and letters. But if the admiral returned, Erwin would never know peace again. Not like this. But the admiral could have meant something completely different. He might have referred to the very terseness between them that so tore into Erwin with its blunt claws, to the dancing and side-stepping that was once necessary, once wise, but that ever since had meant nothing but blistered feet.

The admiral turned and began to leave without his answer.

“Yes,” Erwin called after him.

The admiral didn't turn. His step faltered for only a moment. Long after he had gone, Erwin debated whether he had answered one question or both.

He didn't have an answer even as the admiral returned the very next day. Erwin was not yet a third into the bundled old letters but as the kids led him to their favorite brooks and cliffs, he learned he had not come for him. He wondered, idly, how the man could afford to spend so much of his time away from the business of commanding the queen's navy. He didn't dwell.

The letters were ready by nightfall, and as if by divine circumstance, the admiral stepped into the cabin right as Erwin wound the twine around the pages. Now that the sun had rocked itself to sleep, Erwin could see beyond his violent halo. Silver streaked through black. Some fell into his face. Some was drawn into a loose tail. Erwin traced the puckered edges of old burns almost entirely by rote. He couldn't see them anymore. The sun had soothed him.

The admiral cocked his head, and Erwin knew he had stared too openly, too long. He offered the bundle with eyes downcast and breathed again only when the door had shut.

He returned every day. It should have become easier. Erwin should have grown accustomed, just as with any other thing, with any other person, with any other man. It should have become easier to breathe. It should have become easier to pretend.

One afternoon, Erwin strolled through the woods with a little hand in his own. The nameless girl had begun to sleep in her bed. She ate more, threw up less. When he had found her taking her first tentative steps outside after months of having rooted herself to her corner of the cabin, Erwin accompanied her wherever she wished. On one outing, they had nearly reached the brook behind the cabin. It appeared the heat wouldn't let them reach their destination. She stumbled often, dizzied by the thick air. Her dark hair was scalding to the touch.

As they returned to the cabin, Erwin caught the admiral demonstrating a proper takedown to a rapt audience. He'd shed his shirt. Sweat pooled in his collarbones, in the valley of his spine. They dotted the coiling images on his back and chest. Erwin didn't stop to look closer.

The nameless one ran to greet him as Erwin went inside to fill several flasks with water for her and the rest. The stone bounced off her blouse as she rustled through the glass. Despite his severity, despite the images of death stitched into his skin, despite the razor edge in his voice and the power in his stride, she opened to him faster and more readily than even to Erwin. Erwin wondered if he should be envious. He wondered why he was not envious.

He pointedly looked away from the admiral as he passed the water around. He turned and headed back for the cabin. The sooner he completed his work, the faster the man would leave.

“Papa!”

Erwin turned. She stood behind the admiral and tugged at his arm. As he knelt, looking as bemused as Erwin felt, her face brightened. He'd never seen such a smile. She pointed at the admiral's back, right between the blades.

“A jackdaw! Like in the story?”

She watched Erwin expectantly. The admiral froze in genuine shock. His eyes shot immediately to Erwin's.

Erwin didn't remember what he'd said to her. Something benign, like _sure_ or _that's right_ , and then a hurried _I need to go_ , or _I'll be right back_.

_“Describe it again. It's been a while.”_

He moved on leaden legs. He did not know where or how but he needed to move, he needed to not see, to not be seen. He needed never to think, never to feel again. He needed time.

_“This is how it should've ended. I'm no wordsmith but-”_

But time didn't need him. His hands were chilled and bloodless. Cold sweat plucked at his cadaverous skin. He was spilling out of his own body.

His knees knocked against cliffside rock. The scrapes knitted shut before his eyes. Incensed, he clawed at his legs, his arms. The skin did not even blush. He may as well have scraped his nails against titanium, against steel. If he threw himself off this cliff, his skull would reset itself before the next wave surged to meet him. He was inhuman. He did inhuman things. He should think inhuman thoughts. He should feel inhuman things.

_“Do you still think you burned by accident?”_

Live wire shudders snapped at his spine. His forehead touched the hot stone before him as if in prayer. The earth suffered a baptism of poisoned tears.

“So you told them the story.”

Erwin choked on the air in his lungs. He was sure he hadn't been followed. He was so sure he hadn't been followed. The voice was close. The admiral stood beside him. Erwin refused to turn around.

“I can't be like you. I can't pretend. I don't want to.”

The admiral rounded him, but Erwin rose to his knees and turned away. His eyes burned. He squeezed them and bit fissures into his lip.

“Doesn't look like you want to either,” the admiral said, and as his titan heart boiled in his chest, Erwin couldn't say whether it was the commander or the runaway who shook his head, couldn't tell which one repented, which one resisted.

The admiral's hand rose. The spidery white scar was nearly gone. Maybe it had faded away long ago, and Erwin only saw the shadow that memory cast. His hand hovered over his jaw. Erwin flinched as it troubled the fine hairs on his cheek. If he touched him, he will burn. His skin will peel over his shattering bones and Erwin will have finally finished what he'd started.

“I'll kill you.”

The admiral took advantage of Erwin's shock by cradling his face in his hands and he didn't burn, he didn't shatter. “Isn't that what this is about? What's it's always been about?” He asked, and lifted his chin until he looked him in the eye. “Do you think I'm weak? Do you think I can't do it?”

“You can,” Erwin breathed.

“Then I will. I'll kill you. Right now,” he said and his hold on him tightened and his brows drew together and Erwin knew like he knew the sun would rise and the tides would return that he would. He would. Levi would. Erwin made a sound like a laugh, like a sob.

“Thank you. Levi. Thank you.”

The name was clumsy on his tongue. He hadn't spoken it aloud in so long. Levi's mouth twitched, as if he knew, as if he heard it, too.

“Any last anythings, then?”

Erwin looked away.

“What?”

Erwin shook his head.

“What?” Levi pressed.

“It's selfish.”

Levi snorted. “What? A tour of the palace? A party? A fancy whore?”

The beasts leered and gnashed their teeth on his tight, corded arms. “It's silly,” Erwin said. He looked up, but Levi only peered back, only waited.

“She asked me today. She asked me to help her choose a name.”

Levi didn't say anything, not at first. He didn't laugh or sneer. He was the picture of severity.

“We'll wait.”

“It could take...she's so unsure, it could take-”

“We'll wait.”

Erwin shook his head. He didn't deserve his generosity. He didn't deserve his forgiveness.

It spilled out in a sloppy, ugly rush. “Levi, in the cabin, when I said those things, when I – when I said, you, when I-”

“I know.”

“When you returned from the expedition all those years ago,” he said, and his eyes welled again, and his hands trembled again, “when I said-”

Levi knelt beside him. “Idiot. I know.”

Erwin frowned. “Know…?”

He adjusted Erwin's crooked collar. “I never left.”

“You did. I heard the...the horse…”

The horse. He'd heard the horse. He hadn't stepped outside. He hadn't checked. He'd heard the horse.

“You knew,” Erwin breathed.

“You think I believed that? You think for one fucking second I believed that shit? Yeah, I snuck back. Yeah, I saw.”

Erwin didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to breathe.

“Someone who doesn't give a shit, someone who never gave a shit, they don't fall apart like that,” Levi said. He wiped tear tracks from his face. Erwin's eyes fluttered shut at the touch. “Like this.”

“I left to get Hange,” Levi said. “I didn't know what to do. I panicked. I thought you were hurt, the way you… the way you screamed...and then you passed out and I ran and when we came back, you were gone.” His voice rose. It shuddered. “If I had just fucking stayed-”

“No-”

“Yes. But it doesn't matter now.”

Erwin thought back to noises and locked doors, to glass and broken things in the trash the next morning, and he could imagine it now, and he hated that he could imagine it now.

“I'm leaving,” Levi said. “One of your brats from the Corps will play courier between you and Brandt. I can't keep bullshitting the crown. Admiral duties and shit. When your kid gets her name-”

“You'll come?”

Levi watched him. A wave collided with the rocks below. He was unreadable.

“Yeah.”

Erwin rose as Levi turned to leave. He had a hundred and one questions. A thousand and one things he should have said, a thousand more he should say now, another thousand for tomorrow, still another for the day after that. Jackdaw wings rippled on his back. The earth and the moon danced on his nape, the swollen sun on the small of his back.

“Wait.”

Levi turned. The faces sneered at Erwin in the twilight.

“Why?”

Levi followed his eye to the visions of hell immortalized up and down the lengths of his arms. It was a small eternity before he answered, and when he did, he spoke as if he wanted no one in the world but Erwin to hear.

“People are forgetting. I'm forgetting. I don't want to forget.”

 


	19. The Promise, Again

 

True to his word, the admiral did not return. The books and letters kept coming, a welcome diversion in between taking the nameless girl in his arms and offering her Aaliyahs and Catarinas and Micas and Josephines, offering her the names of queens and artists and heroines and knights, offering the names of wild things, names with rich histories, names with no history at all.

But she wanted to visit the brook. She wanted to hold toads and watch the others swim in the ocean or play cards. She didn't hear the ticking in his chest.

She tried on a name for a day, then another, then a third. She was in no hurry, and Erwin didn't rush her. To name oneself is an exercise of autonomy, of power. To name oneself is to promise, to remember.

The books weren't enough. Lessons were cut short. Stories went unread. For three uninterrupted nights, he woke clawing at his head, certain that it had burst beneath titanic teeth. During the day, his arm ached. It whined with such intensity that he couldn't keep his food down. He stopped eating. Soon, he couldn't even sleep. His body was staging an open rebellion.

Of course he knew how intimately his body responded to his thoughts ever since he'd been injected with one serum, ever since he consumed two more. In the earliest days, his throat would peel at the slightest irritant. His skin split and boiled if he dared think an envious thought. But even wrestling the reigns of his transformation away from chance and circumstance hadn't undone his connection to this entity within him, to this last titan soul that overheard a certain promise and threatened to turn him inside out should he fulfill his end.

His arm flared hottest when the girl perked up at the sound of a name. Coals hissed through his gut should a day pass and a name remained in her favor. It knew. It was eating him alive.

Erwin couldn't stay. He loathed that his last memories of her, of all the children, were becoming dizzied and muffled by sweat-soaked sheets, by sores and aches and an eternally roiling gut. There was no threat to them any longer. They were self sufficient. He'd taught them that much.

He wandered. Within days, he could eat again, only a bite or two, but it was enough. He lost himself in wildland thickets and congested city streets alike, hood up and beard untrimmed in case anyone from what felt like a thousand years ago had a fantastic memory for faces. Occasionally, he doubled back to visit the cabin. He was overcome that first day, the dogpile grew so large and the excited shouts so numerous that he could almost ignore the tightening in his chest and tremor at his spine that announced his body's renewed ouroboros. The girl shook her head when he asked. No, she hadn't found one. Not yet. Soon, but not yet.

Erwin set out again. He'd never wanted it for himself, a life beyond the walls. It was wonderful and terrible, but it wasn't for him. When he came across a beautiful thing – a robin bathing in a still pond, a waterfall, little hands closing on the hem of a mother's sundress – he was an intruder. Everything his eyes rested on was a stolen thing, stolen from every soldier who paved the way to the future with their bones.

But there was one thing he wanted to steal. One sight he would not mind his eyes stealing again, and again, and again. It was only circumstance that he overheard a conversation between a pair of wharf rats in a coastal kingdom village that _The Ral_ would soon dock. Erwin watched swinging mooring lines from the periphery of a crowd that must have included every able person in the village, watched the sun pool into the sails and glance off the polished bow. Erwin saw him then, orders shouted rapid-fire to the crew as they disembarked with eager spins and wire-hiss to the overjoyed whoops and cheers of the gathered crowd. Wind lapped at sunlit silver and black. He flew from one end of the ship and back to correct this gear malfunction or that unsteady line. He flew like the air was his. He flew like the sky yearned for him.

It was only circumstance that Erwin overheard where next _The Ral_ would dock.

He regretted every moment he needed to cast his hood over his eyes when, even at a great distance, the man looked his way. Erwin was in every moment but this the blind pauper, but when Levi flew, he was the insatiable thief pickpocketing at one harbor and then the next and then the next all the ways the wind breathed for him, all the ways the sea rocked for him, all the ways the sun burned for him.

He doubled back to the cabin when the moon waxed, came back when it waned. Not yet, she said. Soon, she said, but not yet.

So he returned. He followed, he stole. In an unfamiliar town with an unfamiliar name, the sun glared accusatory in Erwin's eyes, having jumped off a nail in the mast or a metal clasp in the rigging. He looked away, blinded, for a moment. He turned back and met hawke's-eye grey, in a moment.

Surely, he imagined it. Still, his heart pounded as he squeezed through the labyrinthine crowd and slipped into old alleyways, brick walls rain-slick, shining too bright and burning his eyes.

“What are you doing here?”

Erwin turned. Levi's chest rose and fell in harsh fits. His anchors had not even entirely slid back into their sheathes.

“Why didn't you send a message?” Levi demanded with what remained of his breath. “Did something happen?” Then, after taking another breath between wind-sheared lips, he asked, “Did she...?”

Levi canted his head at Erwin's silence, as if the fact of him crossing several hundred meters in seconds was an entirely ordinary thing. And maybe it was. Maybe Erwin had had enough of extraordinary things.

“No,” Erwin said when he found his voice. “She's...she's taking her time. And I…I thought I'd travel.”

“So this is coincidence.”

“Yes,” Erwin lied.

Levi's eyes narrowed, but something like a smile played on his lips. He licked them. Erwin watched.

“You're full of shit, Erwin Smith,” he said, and the sound of his name rolled off his tongue like he'd been saying it, thinking it, cursing it, for years, for too many years.

“I have to...” Levi started with a hand raised toward the docks. The way he trailed off, the way his hand froze, he almost looked reluctant.

“I know,” Erwin said, and turned to leave. “I'll write when she-”

Levi shook his head. “Fuck,” Levi muttered. He grabbed Erwin's wrist and pulled him forward, always forward.

Longer legs be damned, Erwin could barely keep up. “But your crew-”

Levi stopped so abruptly Erwin nearly barreled into him. He turned and looked as if he were on the receiving end of a bad joke.

“They're just unloading shit? Right? They're just…there aren't any titans around? Right? They're adults, they can...they can handle themselves?” He grabbed Erwin by his coat lapels. “Can't they handle themselves?”  
Erwin found himself nodding at the outburst, nodding yes, yes, they certainly could. Levi's hands burned through to his chest and Erwin looked into that lost white eye and if he could give him both his own, one to replace his own and one for good luck, he would.

Levi grabbed his wrist and started off again down one street and another, and when the masts pierced the tops of bakeries and tailor shops, Levi turned back and again, his steps faltered.

His eyes remained on the masts. “Can I be selfish?” He asked no one in particular, not even Erwin. “Can I, just once?”

Erwin didn't know what brought this about, any of it, but he nodded anyway. “You-”

“I can, can I? No one's gonna…there aren't any more….” He laughed hollowly and moved forward again. “You got a place here?” he called over his shoulder.

“No, I-”

“I got a place.”

He stopped there often, Levi explained as he led Erwin into a corner room at an inn. The innkeeper keeps the room clear for him, and for a generous tip. “Might as well, with this ridiculous paycheck,” Levi said. Erwin thumbed through the books piled into one corner. He found his own writing staring back at him. His page turning caught Levi's attention mid-inspection of the room's cleanliness.

“Emilia visits,” Levi snapped too-quickly. “Leaves her shit all over the place. Gets that from you.”

Erwin rose and he meant to watch the sprawling town from the window, but Levi demanded his attention without a word, without a glance. He watched him, the esteemed admiral to the greatest navy on earth, hop to reach a top shelf.

“At least there's something from me,” Erwin said. “The way she talks…”

“Is she still fucking swearing?”

Erwin gave him a pointed look.

Levi set about dusting the corners the cleaners had missed. “She's her own person. Not my business if she surrounds herself with shit-talking sailor types.” He started on a cabinet.

“And what type of sailor are you?”

Levi watched him from the corner of his eye, and all at once, Erwin couldn't recall a moment since he was discovered at the docks when Levi had taken his eyes from him. There was always the chance, however little, that Erwin could unexpectedly transform, but that reason didn't sate him anymore.

“You want a cheat sheet or something?”

“Depends. Will there be a test?”

“Depends. Will you get up and leave in the middle of it?”

The temperature dropped. Erwin missed a breath. “Levi-”

“I'm gonna take a bath.”

Erwin's words died in his throat. Levi pulled his cravat from his throat. “Jana still getting those nightmares?”

“No,” Erwin said stiffly. Relief warred with cowardice. He should have pressed. He should have spoken. Instead he said, “Not the same ones, anyway.”

“Yeah? What is it this time? She eating right?”

Erwin set to arranging the mess of books on the floor to give his hands something to do. “Yes-”

“Then you're still telling them those shitty stories right before bed.” He folded his cravat, the same one. All those years, and the very same piece of cloth.

“N-” but Erwin stopped. Levi tsked knowingly as he shucked off his jacket but Erwin shook his head. “No. Not the fairy tales.”

“Fairies, talking frogs, whatever, that shit fucks with you when you're a kid.”

“I told them about the war.”

Levi's hands slowed as he folded his jacket. He had his back to him. Erwin couldn't see his face. After a second or two that lasted each a hundred years, Levi draped the jacket over a chair.

“What about Christof?” Levi asked. The vest joined the jacket. He began on his shirt buttons.

“The fever broke,” Erwin said. He finished setting the books and moved to the window. “Faster, this time.”

Levi moved to the next room and called through the thin walls, “Didn't see you had chamomile.”

Erwin's voice rose to compete with the clang of the boiler. “Peppermint tea did it.”

“Cham's better,” Levi called. Erwin smiled. This debate was resurrected with every fever.

Erwin watched the city rock itself to sleep from the open window as they debated the finer points of easing a mild fever. Crates clattered in the distance as peddlers packed their wares. Hovering over the sounds of the city was the sounds of a filling tub from the next room.

Even as Levi shut the door, he demanded more from Erwin, always more, asking questions he'd asked before, hearing the same answers he'd heard before, winding Erwin's voice about him like he meant to keep it, like he meant to steal it for himself.

Erwin shivered. The thought was unnecessary, unfounded. Levi's intentions were so transparent that voicing them aloud was an insult. He was keeping an eye on him, and that was the end of it. Though Erwin hadn't felt the serum in him stir since he'd left the cabin, he couldn't know what else might set it off, set him off.

After a time, the questions stopped. Even the crest of bathwater against the walls of the tub that were so clear through the paper-thin walls had grown still.

“Levi?” He called. When he heard nothing in reply, he reached the door. He studied the wood grain for a moment before making his way back to the windowsill. Let the man have his few moments of peace from a creature who so often robbed him of it.

He counted every second in the next minute that passed, which was itself strenuousgiven that he loathed counting anything, much less time. Erwin rested his forehead against the door.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

No answer. Dread pooled in his gut.

“I'm coming in,” he said softly, and turned the knob.

Deep, rhythmic breathing drifted against steam-slick, windowless walls. The door shut with a languid, dragging click. The flame in a single lamp carved deep shadows on Levi as he lay motionless, head thrown back against the tub. His chest rose and broke the surface in one breath before falling and rising to sew ripples across the water again.

Erwin hated to disturb him, but he knew nothing would disgust him more than to wake in clammy bathwater. He knelt by the lip of the tub and reached for his shoulder.

Levi grabbed Erwin by the throat before his eyes had even opened. When they did, when he saw Erwin, he drew away as if scalded.

“Shit,” he breathed.

“You fell asleep.”

“No shit.”

The lighting cast his sunken eyes into even deeper shadow. Erwin wondered how long his voyage must have been, how long he had gone without rest. Levi rubbed his eyes and tried to catch his breath. Erwin watched his pulse pound against the thin underside of his raised wrist. The titans twisted and laughed. When he turned back to Levi, he found that steel grey watching him.

Levi canted his head in thought and said, “You hate that I did this, don't you?”

Bathwater trickled into an open maw. It raced across bulging eyes and malformed noses. Erwin's jaw worked. “I understand why-”

“Do you hate it?”

“It's not-”

“Do you hate it?”

“Yes.”

It was as much a brand as a reminder, as much a curse as a promise. He didn't realize until that moment how desperately he wanted to unwrap these pictures from his skin and reproduce them a thousandfold on his own if it would banish war from his body, if it would ease the history of bloodshed out of his breath, out of his muscle and bone.

Levi leaned back, satisfied. He rested both arms on the rim of the tub. Conversationally, he asked, “What else do you hate about me?”

Erwin frowned so deeply that Levi snorted.

“Shit. You'd think I told you to go fuck yourself with a face like that.”

Erwin smiled, a hollow thing. He stood to leave as Levi reached for a washcloth and feathers danced on his shoulder blades. His head canted too heavily. He righted himself too slowly. For all his bravado, he was inordinately exhausted.

“Let me,” Erwin offered, unthinking. Levi turned and looked at his offered palm. When reason caught up with his tongue, Erwin was ready to apologize, to recant and leave as he should have done. Levi, too, looked as if his mouth was rising around a _no_.

But slowly, as if he feared dropping it, Levi put the washcloth in his hand. The tips of their fingers met and parted.

“Sit up.”

Levi groaned but did it anyway because of course he listened, of course he obeyed. He gathered his own hair and moved it to his front. The washcloth hovered over Levi's nape, wrinkled tightly in Erwin's hands. The first pass was hesitant and stiff, but Levi said nothing. He too, Erwin saw, had stopped moving but to rub circles into the outside pad of his own thumb beneath the water. He wondered if that was what Levi had been doing beneath his cloak as the gates rose to inaugurate each expedition beyond the walls.

The second pass moved over the grey nape of the jackdaw and Erwin's heartbeat rose at the stupidly hysterical thought that he might scrub the image away.

Erwin obeyed every _Harder_ , scrubbed until the moon glowed, until the jackdaw blushed. He moved away when Levi squirmed and leaned back against the tub. Erwin braced his arm against the floor to rise, but Levi offered his own. He said nothing when Erwin's strokes may have passed too heavily, too rough, over the images, because these, and only these, Erwin wouldn't mind scraping off. Wordlessly, the man arched and Erwin passed over the images of wild things bracketing his ribs and swallowing his heart.

In the Survey Corps, a body was a body. Erwin had seen his share of them bruised, split and crushed. A body was a vessel was a machine. But this was no machine, not anymore. Maybe not ever. Levi never did meet any simple category, never did sit well in a box. He followed. He led. He comforted. He killed. He hated. He loved.

Erwin took his time with Levi's hands. The cloth passed between each finger. He pushed back the pads of each one, so small in his own, and scrubbed beneath the nail the way he'd seen Levi do it after expeditions.

Experimentally, he kneaded into the flesh of his palm. Levi inhaled sharply and turned away. Lamplight forged across the strong cords in his neck, across the set of his bolted-shut jaw.

Erwin massaged his palm and then his knuckles, all but the one that suffered what looked like rope burn. He gently blew into the wound. The muscle in his arm jumped, and Erwin saw, even in the petulantly flickering light, that the tattoos did not obscure his scars or burn marks as he'd first assumed. Not a drop of ink crossed the war-drawn calligraphic violence on his chest, his arms, his legs. The pictures traveled under, over, around, even for the barely-there puckers of burn scars across his neck and chest. Nothing was hidden. Nothing was forgotten.

But the sea touched him, too. Not a hundred baths would wash the salt from his body, the smell of it from his hair. The sun so dearly regretted being unable to reach him for so long through the greedy earth that it kissed him brown.

Erwin moved to his other arm and scrubbed like he meant to rub out his every lie. With the sweat and salt and grime that fell from him was every word Erwin never said, every touch he never gave. It was too late, far too late, and a thousand times more presumptive to say and give them now. Levi surely had a partner, and surely with children of his own – the alternative was unthinkable. With the way he pampered and spoiled and disciplined Erwin's own – it was unthinkable.

Levi's breath hitched. Erwin looked up from where he'd begun to knead his other hand.

Levi shook his head. He'd turned away when Erwin moved to his other side. His ears reddened. “It's nothing.”

“If it hurts, I can sto-”

“Don't stop.”

So Erwin didn't stop. Levi's chest shuddered occasionally from shackling the sounds denied by his iron-gate jaw. Erwin wanted to tell him it was alright, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was for the best that Levi strangled himself if a single honest sound had boiled such a hole in Erwin's chest that his own breath tumbled out, too-loud and uneven.

Levi didn't offer his legs so Erwin didn't presume. He stood and rinsed the washcloth in a nearby basin. Behind him, Levi rubbed idly at his neck until it graced the room with an audible crack. When Erwin returned, he saw that he had curled in on himself, arms and legs pulled close and eyes distant.

Erwin dried his hands. He took his time, but why, he couldn't say. There was nothing else for him to do. There was nothing else to say.

He started out the door. “I'll leave you to-”

“Wait.”

Erwin turned. Levi hadn't moved, wasn't even looking at him.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” Levi asked.

“No.”

Levi shrugged, as if it didn't matter one way or the other. “So stay.”

Erwin rummaged for something, anything, to say to that, but the moment had passed. He took a seat near the boiler Levi had used to heat the water. Erwin looked away, because now a body wasn't just a body wasn't just a machine. It was too intimate now. Erwin didn't know the rules. He didn't know how to play.

Levi made an amused sound, and Erwin looked up to see that he had twisted backward to look at him. His chin rested on his arms where they folded at the lip of the tub.

“You look like I just sent you to a corner for misbehaving.”

Erwin laughed softly and looked away again. Levi didn't.

“Was I misbehaving?” Erwin asked. He thought of that wife or husband. Maybe they were waiting for him at home. Maybe they had a garden, and in it, all the chamomiles in the world.

“Erwin.”

Erwin looked up. Lazily, Levi turned back around and laid his head on the tub's rim.

“Wash my hair.”

A little like a declaration, a little like a demand. Erwin smiled and got up. No niceties, no hedging. No _please_ , no _thank you_. He found the vial Levi pointed to and poured the lotion into his palm. He knelt by the tub and announced it with his crackling knees. Levi huffed a laugh even as something of his popped in answer as he sat up.

Levi could just barely keep his head on his shoulders despite how gently Erwin massaged his scalp. When Erwin finished, he bowed forward and threaded the suds out of his hair. The tight, corded muscle in his back jumped and stretched. Erwin wondered if he told his husband why the sun folded into the curve of his spine. He wondered if his wife ever asked about the wings on the flats of his blades.

But something caught his eye, something he hadn't seen before Levi had bent so far. Some muscles remained rigid. Some jumped and remained tensed for too long.

As Levi straightened, Erwin decided to reach for him, decided to misbehave. Levi inhaled so sharply when Erwin's thumbs pressed into either side of his nape that he swore he'd hurt him. His hands jerked away.

“Wait,” Levi breathed.

Slowly, Erwin's hands returned, ever mindful if Levi changed his mind, if even the slightest stiffness gave him pause. When his palms returned to his feathered back, Levi bowed his head. When he rolled and kneaded and ground the tangled knots from his steel back, the water stirred with the force with which Levi's hands shot to curl into his thighs and the edge of the tub to anchor himself.

Erwin eyed what he knew was an especially sore spot and bullied the knot from his back until his wrists throbbed in protest. Though the water and the room had long since cooled, sweat beaded on Erwin's brow. When he looked up, he found a white-knuckled fist in Levi's mouth, jaw snapped tight. Lamplight lapped at his arms. It burned him alive. Titans wailed over horse cry in blood-rich mulch.

Erwin reached around him, hour-hand patient, and closed his hand over his wrist. Something like anger passed over Levi's face, something like irritation or fury or even fear, but Erwin was determined to misbehave. Erwin's hand remained closed around Levi's own, not moving, not squeezing. His thumb passed over the riot in his veins, a warm, solid weight on a heartbeat that belonged more to a hummingbird than a man of war.

The sound of his teeth parting from his fist was a sound they both knew, a sound they'd heard a hundred times before. Scarlet trickled river-lines over his wrist. Erwin reached blindly for a clean towel and wrapped it around the broken skin. Red smeared against titan maws.

Erwin still searched for himself in the remains of his failure to find his father's truths. He still searched for his own. He found one, just one, in the only bite that ever bled the strongest man alive. He found one in the only way a titan would ever taste a single drop of him.

The towel slipped from his hand and Erwin didn't think before bringing the angry marks to his lips like they belonged there, because they belonged there. Iron welled on his tongue. Salt stung his lips.

“Do you know what you're doing?”

Erwin opened his eyes, unknowing that they had closed. He hadn't seen that look on Levi in more years than he could remember. More years than he could name. He had sometimes wondered, but knew now what it was a titan saw just before its end.

His blood-slick bottom lip dragged against the deepest mark as he breathed a “No,” into his hand.

Levi's hand moved out of his grip. A hand that strangled men and felled beasts wrapped around his throat. “Me neither,” Levi breathed, and pulled.

He'd seen the raised floor-plank when he came in. Erwin knew the knife was there, knew it was a harsh breath away. But he felt not one but five points in his nape, felt a cupid's bow against his lips, and maybe he needed to open an eye to banish the lies his mind could no longer feed his body.

Erwin shook his head, and Levi drew back, but only just. “We can't-”

“Why not?”

 _I'll_ _burn_ _you_ hovered on his tongue. _I'll_ _burn_ _you again_. Before he could speak it, Levi grabbed his hand and plunged it into the cooled water. Erwin's heart hammered against his chest. “Why-”

“You're not as sneaky as you think. Or your brats aren't as stupid as you thought. Do it.”

The floor could not have given under him and struck in him a more mortal terror. But Levi's hand was not gentle. It was not patient.

“I don't-”

“Do it.”

He'd been so careful. Only when the matches were soaked. Only when the fire wouldn't start. Only when their backs were turned. But one of them had seen. One of them knew. Maybe all of them knew, always knew.

Levi sighed contentedly as steam coiled out of the heated water. Erwin withdrew his blistering hand and blinked the stars from his eyes. Levi led his bowing head to his shoulder.

“You must have someone,” Erwin whispered, his tongue at last untangled. “A-a wife, a-”

“There's no one.”

“-kids-”

“None.”

“I don't know how to…I've been on my own for so long-”

“Me too.”

“You're my executioner.”

“So what?”

Erwin drew away. “Does it not seem a conflict of interest?”

“You don't trust me?”

“It's not-”

Levi grabbed him by the collar. “My promises mean nothing to you?”

“I'm afraid.”

“Afraid.”

“Afraid I'll want to live. Afraid I'll become selfish-”

“So be selfish.”

Erwin laughed quietly, disbelieving.

“I bet you can't go a full minute,” Levi said.

“Of what?”

“Of doing everything you've ever wanted to do.”

“I'm not a betting man.”

Levi laughed. It so overtook him that dimples rose in his cheeks, that he could barely breathe. Erwin hadn't seen him laugh in a lifetime. He'd never seen him laugh like this. He didn't know what it meant that his hands moved of their own will, didn't know what it meant that he closed the distance between them so quickly that it hurt.

What it meant was Levi rising to his knees, snaring him, and plotting a course around the column of his throat and the swell of his chest with wanderer's hands. It meant Erwin parting his lips at the licks at the seam of his lips by the man who gave him the sea. It meant touching the moon and scoring his nails into the sun as humanity's strongest tipped him into the waters.

Erwin broke the surface and splashed Levi in retaliation. In his ear, Levi laughed, “Your reflexes are shit, old man.” He nipped at the lobe, squeezed out from under him and stepped out of the tub.

As Erwin followed, Levi wrapped a towel around his middle and said, “Not a betting man, my ass-”

Erwin looked up when Levi trailed off.

Levi stared. “You're dry.”

Erwin looked down as if he couldn't believe it himself. He'd been so distracted that he'd barely noticed that he'd done it. Even his clothing had dried. Only the very tips of his collar and sleeves were still damp, but only just. The process was so removed from conscious thought that it may as well have been a breath, may as well as happened in a breath.

Levi came closer and rubbed his steaming shirt between his fingers. He let his towel fall. “Dry me.”

“No-”

“You can't?”

“I won't.”

“But you can.”

Levi took his hands in his own and traced the constellation of lines on his palms. He raised them to his face and stared again into the sun that blinded him and asked for more. Erwin's thumb traced the faintly puckered skin across his burned cheek, and he wondered if this was how Levi offered forgiveness.

Levi's eyes widened as heat licked his skin from the calloused pads of Erwin's palms.

The pain was so familiar that it was negligible. Erwin's palms peeled as they rose no less than an inch from Levi's skin. Levi stood motionless but for the rise and fall of his chest. Erwin's skin burned and restitched so rapidly that he did not even bleed. Levi's hair was dry in one stroke, two, three.

“We searched for you for three years,” Levi said.

Erwin's hands rose and fell with the motions of Levi's chest.

“Word got out. The kingdom was in a panic.”

The air warbled between them. Droplets hissed away.

“I told them you ran.”

Erwin warmed the moon and the sun.

“I told them I killed you.”

Erwin knelt. His hands knit and re-knit on their way down Levi's thighs and calves.

“After a while, I believed it, too.”

Erwin's hands cooled. He looked away. He felt a hand in his hair.

“It took three morons in a shitty boat. It took going insane trying not to see your handwriting and your stupid fucking mannerisms in Emilia's. Do you still blow exactly four times on your coffee? Still scratch your stupid eyebrows when you can't find something?”

Erwin felt a thumb wipe the sweat from his brow. He fell to his haunches and rested his forehead on Levi's hip. His eyes burned. He refused to look up.

“I thought I knew what I wanted. Most of the Corps who didn't retire joined the navy so I joined, too. Whatever it was then, it isn't now. I'm more a taxman than a sailor.”

Another hand traced idle things into his back.

“I'm resigning.”

Erwin looked up, and he couldn't quite hide the shock in his face.

“I never wanted to be admiral,” Levi said. “I never wanted to cut ribbons and babysit dignitaries. When I saw what you did with yourself...what you always wanted...when I saw all those fucking kids...”

Erwin's thumb rubbed soothing circles against his calf the way he'd seen Levi do with his hands. “What will you do?” Erwin asked against his flushed skin.

Levi plotted a voyage on his back. He traced an idle finger across the ocean between his blades.

“I'm going to sail. Straight across.”

Erwin knew the maps. He knew what waited across the Atlantic. He knew no entreaty would stop Levi now, but he had none to offer. He knew. Somehow, he always knew.

“Will you wait for me?” Levi asked. His voice was unrecognizable.

Erwin wanted to kiss the swell of his hip, so he did. The hand in his hair tightened. His abdomen jumped as Erwin's breath skirted over it, a labored, heavy thing.

“Yes. I'll wait for you.”

 


	20. The Wait

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you're not allowed to read it unless you play [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi57d50pCUw) because I said so

 

The next time _The_ _Ral_ docked at his own little island, it was bare of the queen's colors. Levi acted the cool, demanding captain, but Erwin knew the stiffness in his spine, the barely-there tremor in his hands. When the business of recruiting fellow adventurers began to wind down, Erwin showed him the brook behind the cabin. Erwin mentioned something about lost years as they lounged against a fallen trunk. Levi wondered aloud, eyelashes feathering collarbones, what constituted _lost_ at all.

Final preparations would take several weeks. Nuisances like ample cargo, course corrections and crew employment contracts were doubly difficult without the support of the queen's naval advisers, but Levi wanted it done on his terms, and he wanted it done right.

Levi's affection for the children grew beyond what even Erwin thought possible. He played with them, swam with them, tussled with them, read with them. There was a desperate energy to it that Erwin knew, that he wished he didn't understand. This would be the first journey of its kind since humanity left the walls. The safest soldiers had not been at the tip of the formation's spear, but in its very middle. Erwin buried the thought as soon as it rose, always heavy in his throat, always daring to spill. He would not allow the future to sour what little joy remained untainted, if only just, by the past.

No one, Erwin thought, not even himself, commanded Levi's attentions more often than the nameless girl, who still oscillated between _Amys_ and _Alexandras_ and _Victorias_. She resembled him more than Erwin had ever dared to acknowledge. Reserved but demanding. Severe but kind. Dark hair spilled past her waist, always a leaf or withered flower lost in its folds. Levi read to her most of all.

On a brisk morning, Levi led him to the docks. Erwin stepped onto _The Ral_ and reverently traced the webs of rigging as he passed.

“She does the job,” Levi said as Erwin passed every immaculate inch, “but the damn thing lists like a drunk in high winds. Less than _The Zakarius_ or _The Jaeger_ , but...”

“I can't think of anyone more suited to right her,” Erwin said, turned away as if whispered into the wind. He felt a heavy hand on his back.

Erwin learned how to touch him. He learned how to ignite him.

But Levi's roaming, appreciative, eyes may as well have been iron brands. And because Levi could read him just short of his mind, he demanded to know why Erwin turned every mirror, why he insisted on keeping his beard, and why he covered his hands and feet and as much of his own body as often as he could, why he so deeply hated his own skin.

“I'm not aging,” Erwin said. He heard Levi shut the door to the inn. He seated himself beside him on the front steps.

“Some would kill for that,” Levi said after a while, because there was no point in pretending, not anymore.

“I'm beginning to wonder if I'd kill for the opposite. Do you remember if...”

“No. Jaeger grew. So did the others. Must be the cocktail.”

Erwin's head fell into his hands, and blood rushed in his ears. The poison mocked him even now.

“Must be.”

Levi moved closer. His lined, weathered hands took Erwin's own, Erwin's too-smooth, too-youthful hands. His hair, more silver than black, caught in Erwin's beard, one as rich and deep an ocher as autumn's first fallen leaf.

“I could do it before I leave,” Levi whispered into his chest. “You don't have to wait. There's no guarantee that I'll-”

“No.”

“Don't be stupid-”

“No, Levi,” Erwin said into his hair, because he'd made a promise he intended to keep.

 _The Ral_ made frequent stops at the island. Erwin took to waiting by the docks to watch the sun rise even when the ship wasn't scheduled to land. Sometimes, the nameless girl followed him, and together, they asked every passerby their name.

The day came when every calculation was made, when every crewman was ready and every anchor and every last inch of rigging was where it should be and, knowing the girl to still be without a name, Levi repeated his offer, and repeated it again, and Erwin reaffirmed his promise, and reaffirmed it again, and again.

Erwin knelt to let the girl on his shoulders say goodbye. As Levi complained playfully that she hugged far too hard, as she whispered _Goodbye,_ _P_ _apa_ , the green stone she wore dangled before Erwin's eyes. She didn't go a day without it. When the crowd dispersed, when the ship entered the horizon, and when the only sound that remained was the gentle burbling of the sea, the girl laid her cheek on Erwin's head and said that she'd decided on a name.

Every day, Erwin remained a moment longer at the docks. He whittled things for the children. He argued with the dock hands. No religion, no politics, nothing bruising. One day, they wagered whether the cloud that looked like a horse would pass above or below the one shaped like a bird. On another, they wondered what treasures the Ral would bring home. Erwin didn't have to wonder.

Occasionally, he got an odd look from a passing sailor. Occasionally, they glanced his way with sad eyes.

The sky was an aching bruise when an old woman approached him, when Erwin stood and cleared a seat for her on old crates lining the lamp-lit boardwalk.

“You missed Clara's birthday,” she tutted as waves of sweet chamomile enveloped him.

“I know,” he lamented, and warmed her parchment-thin hands in his. “I'm sorry, Kuchel.”

She followed his eyes to the weeping horizon. “Pa-”

“I know,” he said softly. “It'll only be a little longer.”

The wind played with his shirt. It swept across his back like the wayward brush of calloused hands.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For what it's worth, it was as painful to write.  
> I'm going to take a break from this verse but I've got a few scenes that didn't make the cut that I might put out there someday.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading. Every comment, every kudos, all of it kept me going.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Listing [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13356915) by [minxiebutt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/minxiebutt/pseuds/minxiebutt)




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